latest draft for mission (and strategy)

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi Christian,

On donderdag 22 juni 2017 00:02:00 CEST Christian Mollekopf wrote:
> I'm new on the list so sorry for not replying to the thread.
> 
> I was asked to contribute my feedback on the Vision/Mission, so here it
> goes.
> 
> I like Vision and Mission-Statement and they generally reflect my values
> as well. They are very inclusive and fairly loose, which I think is the
> only reasonable thing for such a high-level statement, yet they still
> establish some values, which is good.
> 
> Personally, the strategy points are not too relevant for me, so I'm not
> going comment on the individual points (which I too find generally
> agreeable, nothing in there goes against what I want to achieve), but
> I'm going to comment on why they are not too important to me instead.
> 
> To me, KDE is not one project. We're a diverse bunch of people working
> on a variety of projects with different goals and ideas. As such, as
> much as I can agree with individual strategy points, those are
> ultimately up to the individual projects and their people. Those
> strategic decisions are always tradeoffs, and as such must be made on a
> case by case basis. I think it's entirely fine for an application to
> decide to not be translatable, or to only run on a certain platform,
> these are decisions for the individual projects and people to make, and
> sometime heavily depend on individual goals projects set for themselves.
> 
> The strategy points are fine examples how the vision *could* be pursued,
> but that's all they are to me, so I think there is little point in
> trying to fine tune them too much and I think they must not be treated
> as rules of any sort.
> 
> Personally I'd like to see more great software produced by the KDE
> community and not necessarily "KDE-software" (though that's also ok if
> that's what you're interested in doing of course), so I like that
> openness in the vision and the mission.
> 
> I realize though that I have a developer perspective and there is
> perhaps a need for being more specific for the sake of creating more of
> an identity, and to that end the strategy points perhaps explain the
> mission better.

You are exactly right, these documents are fairly loose and they're not meant 
to be The Law, but give us all a bit more direction. That said, with a 
community as large and diverse as KDE, it can't be overly specific. For that 
reason, we encourage sub-projects in KDE to create a more concrete vision, 
mission and strategy as well. The Krita team has done that some time ago and 
it has brought them a lot more focus and as a result of that focus (and hard 
work!), Krita has become the best in class in their newly found niche (which 
is not meant belittling at all!). In Plasma, we've started on the same 
process, we're working on the Plasma vision right now (see the plasma-devel 
mailing list) and we're planning to drill down to more specifics in that 
process. Perhaps, this can be used as a template for other software as well, I 
can imagine that especially in the early stages of development (Hi Kube! :)) 
it can deliver great value.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org