latest draft for mission (and strategy)

[Alexander Neundorf]

On 2017 M05 29, Mon 21:17:29 CEST Lydia Pintscher 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

nice to see this moving again. :-)

There is not much in this draft to disagree with.
Nevertheless a few comments:
- in the Thomas' survey, I think reliability and stability ranked quite high. 
I cannot really find those here in the strategy. Is this maybe the "quality" in 
the second bullet of "to create a convincing user experience" ? Could it be 
made more obvious ?

- in "control & freedom" it says "integrate well with ...services sharing the 
same values", in "create convincing user experience", it says "integrate well 
with other Free software", but in "reach as many users", it says 
"interoperates well with proprietary software and services". Why does it 
stress in the first two points that we want to integrate well with Free 
software/services, while in point 3 saying that we also interoperate well with 
proprietary solutions ?
I understand that in the "control& freedom" section it makes sense to stress 
the integration with Free services. I don't fully agree to say the same in "to 
create a convincing user experience". If a user has (for whatever reason) to 
use some proprietary service, it doesn't make his user experience better that 
KDE prefers integration with other (Free) services.

- in "promote the development of Free and Open-Source Software", I would put 
the "offer libraries" as first point.


Now to the bigger picture: looking at vision, mission and strategy, all that 
is mentioned what KDE is actually doing is:
"create software products which give users control, freedom and privacy", 
often using Qt.
>From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_statement) :"The purpose 
of a mission statement is to focus and direct the organization itself."
I think the mission draft is nice, but really doesn't give much focus.
Who is actually the target audience for those documents ?
Is any of those documents intended to serve as motivation to join/contribute/
sponsor KDE ?

And a personal note: I think I wouldn't put "promote the Free and Open-Source 
ecosystem" in the mission. I'm in KDE so that users are able to use Free 
software instead of proprietary software by us creating software.
I'm not in KDE to convince users to switch all their software to Free 
software. IMO that's more a political goal which I would expect e.g. in GNU, 
not necessarily in KDE.

Alex