[kde-community] Give People Access to Great Technology - a possible vision

[Cornelius Schumacher]

On Friday 19 September 2014 09:56:39 Andrew Lake wrote:
> 
> I wanted to share a few thoughts in case it might be helpful right now. I
> apologize now for the length. Not that he necessary endorses any of this,
> but Thomas Pfeiffer was gracious enough to provide many of the examples of
> what we're already doing. A pdf that's a bit more readable is here:
> http://goo.gl/kDxkzI

This is a great document. I like how it puts things together. While we have 
become a more diverse community, there still is this common core, and it is 
necessary and helpful to put this into a shared vision. Thanks for continuing 
this discussion.

> In this ecosystem, what does “give people access to great technology” mean?
> Perhaps it could mean:
> 
> "Enable people to be even more awesome by taking much greater advantage of
> every aspect of their technology ecosystem."

I like this interpretation :-)

> Collapsed down to 5 top-level items for conciseness: Desktop at the center.
> Frameworks as enabler. Highly capable integrated applications. Highly
> capable integration with devices and the cloud. Quality.

Yes, and I think we can go one step further. What I would like to see is more 
of devices and the cloud be not only integrated with our desktop, but also 
directly make use of our highly capable quality applications.

The things that make our desktop applications great, can also make 
applications in other contexts great. Our community, our way of collaborating, 
our technology, our backing by the principles of free software, this all can 
shine beyond the desktop as well.

This is not only a technical challenge, it's also a social, political, and 
organizational challenge. Just like we have overcome quite some obstacles in 
making everybody to be able to install our software on a desktop computer, we 
need to address these obstacles in other areas as well. How do we get open 
hardware, how do we distribute our software, who are the partners we need, 
where do we have to adapt our way of developing software? If we find good 
answers to these questions, a whole new world opens to us.

Because in the end it's about people, giving our software to users, and enable 
them to make use of all the wonderful things we can provide.

> Hope this helpful and I'm genuinely happy to be a part of such an amazing
> community,

Yes, yes, and yes :-)

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher at kde.org>