latest draft for mission (and strategy)

[Kevin Ottens]

Hello,

On Monday, 29 May 2017 21:17:29 CEST Lydia Pintscher wrote:
> [...]
> I'd like to invite you all to take a look at the current draft and
> provide your constructive feedback so we can use this as the basis for
> our work for the next years.
> 
> https://community.kde.org/KDE/Mission

Took me quite some time to decide to look at the mission in more details and 
write a reply here. That's in part because I think I might bring doom and 
gloom in this thread.

Indeed, I'm rather torn with it. There are two ways to look at it.


1) It can be seen *retrospectively* as a way to make the implicit more 
explicit. In that regard I think it's a success. As others in this thread 
mentioned it better than I could, I agree it summarizes quite excellently what 
we do. If what we were trying to achieve was make clear what we do, job is now 
done. Congrats everyone involved, it really wasn't easy at all to put into 
words what we've been doing for years.

From that point of view, I would say I got only one small concern. The Mission 
seems to overlap with the Manifesto to some extent, which is likely fine. And, 
at the same time, neither the Vision or the Mission refers to the Manifesto 
which makes it seem somewhat isolated now. Also, the aim behind all those 
documents is to make explicit to outsiders our why, what and how... well, 
that's quite a few documents now. I wouldn't expect them to know how it all 
articulates and that probably needs addressing. I admit I'm not sure how.


2) It can also be seen from the angle of "what prompted the creation of the 
Vision and the Mission?", and did we actually achieve what we wanted when we 
started that process. That's where I think I'll be a pain for everyone 
involved.

I'll recap the events which in my opinion started this soul searching. To me, 
it all goes back to Paul Adams' talk at Akademy 2014. If you don't remember it 
or didn't see it, I'll let you watch the video now:
https://conf.kde.org/en/Akademy2014/public/events/167

I'll wait... You're done? OK, let's carry on.

In short the conclusion was that the community was massively shrinking. To him 
it was likely because we lost focus, a shared technical vision and a shared 
tone (as he put it, I'd have put it differently I think, but let's not get 
into that).

It then led to discussions of course. Who wouldn't want to fix that situation, 
right? Those discussions culminated to Lydia announcing the "Evolving KDE" 
effort in order to "reflect on where we as a community stand and where we want 
to go".

And I think that's on Paul's conclusion and Lydia's initial goal, that the 
Vision and Mission should be judged.

Do they both answer "where we as a community stand"? Obviously yes, see my 
first part in this email, by making the implicit explicit they definitely 
served that purpose.

Do they both answer "where we want to go"? I hope not.

Indeed, once more (i.e. like with the Manifesto), we're describing business as 
usual, just on a different level this time. So if our answer to "where we want 
to go" is: "nowhere in particular, we just like where we're standing now", 
then the job is done from Lydia's initial goal point of view. Still I honestly 
hate the answer since it won't solve one bit of what Paul pointed out three 
years ago.

In my opinion our answer to "where we want to go" was supposed to be something 
else than "nowhere in particular". Then I think we're falling very short on 
that. We face a problem, and instead of putting our efforts to find where to 
go to solve it, we're been pouring over the years massive efforts into 
describing where we currently are. That's understandable but it means we went 
off track in my opinion. If we stop at what we got so far, we're in my opinion 
falling into a kind of conservatism trap. The community will stay put and will 
keep shrinking as people loose interest and less new blood gets in.

I hope for another fate. Because of that, I don't think this is a proper 
conclusion to the Evolving KDE effort or a proper answer to Paul's talk.

Regards.
-- 
Kévin Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net

KDAB - proud supporter of KDE, http://www.kdab.com

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