latest draft for mission (and strategy)

[Martin Flöser]

Am 2017-06-16 21:35, schrieb 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 ?

I think that is fully covered with "provide users with excellent user 
experience and quality".
What else does one want except excellent quality ;-)

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

Personally I would put that last. We hardly provide libraries for the 
larger Free software system. We provide libraries used in the Qt system, 
but that is only a tiny part of the free software world. Also only a 
very small part of the KDE community works on the libraries.

To me the most important one is mentoring and the community.

> 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.

I think that's also part of KDE's job. E.g. by first providing 
integration for Nextcloud instead of Dropbox. Or by KWin working better 
on Mesa drivers than on NVIDIA. I see this as part of our mission in the 
larger free software world. We don't have to be political like the FSF, 
but we have our place and we promote free software over proprietary 
ones.

Cheers
Martin