Merge pull request #491 from scala/lars-hupel-community-rep

Included blog post on Lars's appointment to the Advisory Board

Author: SethTisue

blog/_posts/2016-10-17-lars-hupel-joins-sc-board.md

@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
+---
+layout: blog
+post-type: blog
+by: Jon Pretty
+title: Lars Hupel Joins the Scala Center Advisory Board
+---
+
+It has been almost half a year since we kicked off our first Scala Center
+Advisory Board meeting in New York. With a board primarily made up of
+commercial sponsors, we decided then to offer Bill Venners the role of
+community representative, and Bill has ably filled this role in the two
+meetings so far.
+
+But since then, the sponsors have grown to nine, and to maintain a
+proportionate representation for the community on the board, we decided — with
+the sponsors' unanimous agreement — to invite a second community representative
+to attend and vote in meetings.
+
+We decided to offer the choice of candidate to
+[Typelevel](http://typelevel.org/). This was a reflection of the incredible
+work Typelevel have done to nurture a friendly and open community of
+functionally-minded Scala users around a number of open-source projects. Their
+work is focussed around the Cats, Shapeless and Spire libraries, but has grown
+to include over a dozen other libraries, tools and compiler plugins, all with
+a shared philosophy.
+
+Typelevel have been instrumental in helping to grow the Scala community, and
+the functional elements within it, through regular hacking sessions, and with a
+number of workshops and unconferences colocated with larger Scala events.
+
+So we felt it was only appropriate — given Typelevel's influence, its track
+record, and the pholosophy of welcomeness it shares with the Scala Center —
+that they should choose the second community representative to the Advisory
+Board.
+
+When we spoke to Typelevel, in typical style, they opened [a GitHub
+issue](https://github.com/typelevel/general/issues/42) to discuss the
+invitation, to decide whether to accept it, and to choose a representative.
+We're very glad that they accepted, and selected Lars Hupel to sit on the Scala
+Center Advisory Board alongside Bill.
+
+Lars has made a number of significant contributions to the Scala community in
+the last few years. His open-source contributions started with work as a
+maintainer of [Scalaz](https://github.com/scalaz/scalaz), but he has since
+worked on the code verification tool, [Leon](http://leon.epfl.ch/), and
+[libisabelle](http://lars.hupel.info/libisabelle/), which facilitates
+interacting with the proof assistant, Isabelle, from Scala. All this experience
+gives Lars a deep understanding of Scala, both as a language and through some
+of its the most advanced applications.
+
+The Scala Center shall be very happy to welcome Lars, as one of the founders of
+Typelevel, to the Advisory Board, and at the next meeting (currently scheduled
+for late November) we shall put his appointment to the existing membership for
+approval. We have every expectation he will be a valuable asset to the board!
+