Happy New Year from the F# Software Foundation!

The New Year is traditionally a time to reflect on the year past, and make plans for the year ahead. As we recently started to publish quarterly updates to keep you all regularly updated on what we have been up to, for this post, we will combine both.

Overview of 2019

Membership in the F# Software Foundation has continued its steady growth, and we start 2020 with 3228 members, an almost 25% growth in membership over a single year! Our Affiliated User Group Program has grown as well, and now reaches over 5800 developers in 23 groups on six continents. The Foundation Slack team as well as the F# Community Forums remain active. Our financial position remains strong, though our expenses have grown significantly faster than revenue given some of the new activities we've been involved in over the last year.

In addition to its regular programs, the Foundation continued supporting community organized F# events worldwide, sponsoring Fable Conf, Southern Fried F#, and Open F#. It also started new initiatives in 2019. The Applied F# Challenge, organized by Lena Hall, was a great success, with multiple outstanding submissions highlighting real-world usage of F#. We also sponsored our first Outreachy internship; Nikita, under the supervision of Enrico Sada, contributed to FsAutoComplete.

This year, we organized 2 rounds of the Mentorship program, with a passing of the torch from Gien Verschatse to Jeremy Abbott. Mentors and mentees just completed round 7 of the FSSF Mentorship Program. We had 58 mentees apply compared to 17 mentors. Thank you to all the mentors that volunteered, and a special thank you to the mentor who graciously took on 2 mentees!

The Foundation in 2020

Applications for round 8, the first round of the new decade, are now open. If your New Year resolution involved leveling up your F# skills, becoming a mentor to another F# enthusiast is a great opportunity to do that!

The website redesign effort, which we started last year, has suffered some delays, but is back on track, driven by Dave Curylo and Reed Copsey. The first release of try.fsharp.org, based on the Fable REPL, is now online. The graphic design materials for the new site are now available, and the current goal is to convert the website with the help of community members. We also plan to migrate to a new service this year, to better handle signups and finances. Everybody interested in contributing is encouraged to reach out to Dave Curylo on the new #fssf_website channel of the Slack team.

Given the positive feedback around the Applied F# Challenge, we also plan to organize another challenge event this year, driven by Phillip Carter and Natallia Dzenisenka.

At a higher level, we heard your feedback around the sometimes ambiguous view of the F# Software Foundation and its role, and are planning to address it from multiple directions. Our quarterly reports are a first step in this direction, and will be followed with more regular communications on social media. We intend to also communicate more clearly around our activities and programs. 

The Board also listened, and revisited this from the ground up. The F# Software Foundation now has a new, simplified Mission Statement. Our new Mission places more emphasis on our core activities supporting the community. 

Grow, support, and educate a diverse community around the F# programming language ecosystem

We feel that this new Mission statement will help everybody better focus our energy into growing F# through the community, diversity, and education.

With that, we'd like to say thank you - thank you to all of the members who make the F# Software Foundation what it is. Thank you to the Board of Trustees for your work over the last few months, and thank you to the volunteers who are helping grow the community every day, whether through mentoring, helping with user groups, answering questions on slack, or just continuing to participate in this wonderful F# community!

2019 was a great year, and we look forward to being there as you all make 2020 even better.

Thank you,
Reed Copsey, Jr. and Mathias Brandewinder