[kde-community] Vision, mission and manifesto - what is their definition and purpose?

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Thursday, February 11, 2016 01:22:02 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> On Mittwoch, 10. Februar 2016 21:42:31 CET Alexander Neundorf wrote:
...
> A vision statement alone doesn't do much, either. A mission is needed to
> turn vision into strategy.

Yes. :-)

> > Anyway, I think vision and mission should be defined together, otherwise
> > we'll get ugly discussions once we have decided on the vision, and get
> > into mission- land.
> 
> The discussions cannot be avoided (though I believe they don't have to be
> ugly!), but it seems to me that the two "camps" are much closer in their
> ultimate goal than they are in what they see as the best strategy to achieve
> it.
> So what is bad about first declaring what we agree on and then debate on the
> level where we actually disagree?

The vision may leave quite a bit of room for interpretation, especially since 
it will be short. Some may understand one thing, some may understand another 
thing. This will lead to more conflicts later on due to misunderstandings 
(like "we cannot put this into the mission because it contradicts the vision, 
which we already agreed on.")

As a real example, there are people who understand "The project stays true to 
established practices common to similar KDE projects" from the manifesto as 
"if it has a GUI, the GUI is done with Qt".
The "inclusive" draft explicitely does not put any limits to 
technologies/libraries. One group can with good right say "this contradicts 
the manifesto !", while another group can with similar good rights say "gtk is 
perfectly fine, since the manifesto doesn't mention Qt !".
I think such conflicts could be reduced if it was worded more clearly, or if 
vision+mission are created together.

Alex