This quarter the F# Software Foundation has been engaged on multiple fronts, with several successful efforts to promote the language, build our community, and empower members to enact change within the organization. These included the next iteration of our mentorship program, the new F# Community Diversity Program, and more.

We started a third round of our Mentorship Program this September. The program pairs experienced F# developers with developers of all backgrounds and skill levels to help, teach, and inspire them toward greater F# and functional programming proficiency. The feedback from past rounds has been very positive, and has resulted in members becoming contributors to open source projects such as the F# compiler. While this iteration is smaller than the last one (22 pairs, versus 42 previously), the focus is on simplifying the overall process, to make mentorship more frequent. We hope to be able to organize another wave before this year ends -- so stay tuned, and follow us on Twitter at @fsharporg!

The F# Community Diversity Program is the result of the FSSF's focus on increasing the diversity of its membership. The first initiative of that program, which began in July, was to offer free tickets to Open F# 2017 and FableConf, two F#-oriented conferences. As a result, two applicants from groups underrepresented in tech have been awarded sponsored tickets. The FSSF also sponsored a two-day F# conference in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and plans to support more initiatives in this direction this year.

The "Ask the Board" effort allows members to pose questions and comments to the Board of Trustees via GitHub, which will be discussed during their meetings. The intent is to give FSSF members greater access to the Board of Trustees, while giving the Board more real-time feedback from members on pressing issues within the community.

One immediate result from this initiative was to highlight a broad community interest in improving the fsharp.org website, which is something the Board had started working on already. The main goals are to improve the design, contents and organization of the website with the help of a professional firm, and to find a suitable replacement for TryFSharp. To give FSSF members a voice within this process, there is now a Github issue thread, where members can suggest and vote for specific improvements. The Board will keep using this channel to share progress.

The Speakers program was created last year to help local communities find speakers to present F# content in local meetups, by financially supporting new and experienced speakers with their travel expenses. Feedback on the program, while positive overall, indicated that the process was too complex. The program has now been simplified: speakers who wish to get support for their upcoming F# talks can request it by answering a couple of questions.

Tidbits

• Membership passed 1800 in September; That’s about 40% increase since the beginning of the year.

• The Affiliates Meetup program continues to grow, with new F# meetups joining this quarter from Quito (Ecuador), Bogota (Columbia), Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Vancouver (Canada) and Kinshasa (Congo).