latest draft for mission (and strategy)

[Agustin Benito (toscalix)]

Hi,

thanks for driving this discussion. It is a needed one. Here are my
early comments:

* "builds on open standards to prevent "lock-in" - I think that
prevent lock-in is not a reason but a consequence of building KDE
software on open standards. open stardars are aabout transparency,
agreement, provenance...

* "provides usable security and privacy features to protect against
surveillance and data theft" there is legal surveillance that we do
not want to prevent. In any case, privacy is a right challenged in our
digital era like was not challenged before, in the analogic era. Is
the right to privacy the central point, not the prevention against
data theft. You can prevent your data from being stolen through
proprietary software too, among other options.

* "have consistent, easy to use human interfaces" and "provide a
seamless user experience" seems to me close enough to justify that we
condense them in a single statement.

* I would be carefull with the words "integration" and
"interoperates". In order to work well, both concepts requires two
parties. We cannot guarantee any of them by ourselves.

* Linked with the above, this statement is a set up for failure:
"interoperates well with proprietary software, formats and services" .
In simple words, it is not in our hands to provide a satisfactory
experience when dealing with proprietary software/formats/services. I
would re-formulate this in a way that reflects that we will do our
best.

* "empowers users independent of their abilities" I find this
statement vague. How are we going to empower them? what for? why it is
so important for us to empower software users? I would try to develop
it a little.

* I have a fundamental issue with the whole "user story". We are
upstream. We only reach 0.1% of our currrent users directly. We live
in an industry that has "downstream", that is, integrators and
distributors. I truly believe that one of our limiting factors is our
belief that we can reach users "by ourselves", through direct
interaction. This idea, which is popular in our community, has its
reflection in this Mission statement. No mention to any collaboration
with dowsntream in this section, to reach users.

I have been fighting this widespread belief since I joined in 2005.
Our situation is worse today than ever was, in my opinion. I would
really like to see ourselves turning the situation upside down, which
can start by discussing and ultimately reflecting in this Mission
statement how important it is for us the ecosystem that allow us to
bring our software to user's hands.

Best Regards
Agustin Benito (toscalix)
KDE eV member
Profile: http://es.linkedin.com/in/toscalix


On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 4:17 AM, Lydia Pintscher <lydia at kde.org> wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> Last year we have talked a lot about KDE's vision, fleshed it out and
> wrote it down: https://community.kde.org/KDE/Vision I am proud that we
> have done that. However the work does not end there. We have the
> answer to the question "why are we here". We still need the answer to
> the question "how do we achieve our vision". We've had an insightful
> survery among our community and users and a lot of discussions around
> that. This was then all further discussed in a sessions at QtCon in
> Berlin. After that smaller groups have sat down to take all the input
> and refine it, but then the process got stuck for several reasons. At
> the last board meeting the board and sebas sat down again and looked
> at where we are wrt distilling all the input. It turns out we are less
> far away than we thought. We took the input from the session at
> Akademy and polished the wording slightly. We then analyzed it more
> and figured out the issue that had been bugging us with the existing
> draft: It was mixing mission and strategy. We split it up and this
> seems to work much better.
>
> 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
>
>
> Cheers
> Lydia
>
> --
> Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
> KDE e.V. Board of Directors / KDE Community Working Group
> http://kde.org - http://open-advice.org