[Appeal] Draft for a "vision" document (based on Aaron's initial one).

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 04 April 2005 07:22, Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
> If we limit ourselves to what you call "the deliverables", forget
> "the vision".

not at all... already we have taken aim at working on konqueror (well, a 
content browser), kicker, kdesktop, the icon and widget theme, contextual 
linkage / search, kdepim .. this touches quite a bit in kde already. if these 
efforts reflect "the vision" it will in itself have a major impact on things 
and they can serve as leadership efforts that others can follow if inspired 
to.

i don't see it being possible (nor particularly desirable) to turn KDE into a 
globally top-down managed project. which means we can decide how to do what 
we do and try to influence others through the fruits of those efforts.

> > we don't need to list or detail every thing each of us doing. and more
> > importantly, we shouldn't try and create a "KDE vision".
>
> In a way, this still is what I have in mind.

well, it will be rejected by the broader community because this would 
represent a "taking over" of the project in the eyes of many people. this is 
not necessary. we can create a vision for our own work here, though, and i 
have no doubt that phrased as such most people in KDE will eventually adopt 
those principles if they are compelling and show good results.

> And with Matthias on board now, it should not be to difficult, to
> reference to his original vision document (the mail on newsnet that

no offense to Matthias, but KDE has moved on from being "Matthias' idea". i 
don't see how having Matthias around will help "canonicalize" a KDE vision. 
at aKademy Matthias was looking for a democratized board of developers to 
stabilize and directly oversee kdelibs/base development; he also suggested to 
more or less drop khtml. neither of those things happened or were even taken 
very seriously by the majority of people. in fact, on the khtml front the 
exactly _opposite_ happened and developement revved up over that. 

this is because KDE has grown very large, and that growth has been towards a 
decentralized structure. this is a very powerful form of structure in that 
it's very hard to move simply by pushing on it. 

if Appeal is to be accepted by the community it must not directly take a 
position "against" it by trying to define what KDE is. we can, however, 
change things from the inside out via our demonstrated efforts and we can 
provide a leadership position.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
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