latest draft for mission (and strategy)

[Kevin Ottens]

Hello,

On Sunday, 2 July 2017 20:06:41 CEST Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> On zondag 2 juli 2017 03:43:57 CEST Kevin Ottens wrote:
> > In my opinion our answer to "where we want to go" was supposed to be
> > something else than "nowhere in particular". Then I think we're falling
> > very short on that. We face a problem, and instead of putting our efforts
> > to find where to go to solve it, we're been pouring over the years massive
> > efforts into describing where we currently are. That's understandable but
> > it means we went off track in my opinion. If we stop at what we got so
> > far, we're in my opinion falling into a kind of conservatism trap. The
> > community will stay put and will keep shrinking as people loose interest
> > and less new blood gets in.
> > 
> > I hope for another fate. Because of that, I don't think this is a proper
> > conclusion to the Evolving KDE effort or a proper answer to Paul's talk.
> 
> Thanks for the very thoughtful and critical reply. A first thought, right
> after I read it: We may well have outgrown the phase where we could come to
> a shared and clear direction for all of our software and the organisation.
> In that light, probably the best we could do is to capture what we have in
> common and codify that, this is the Mission as proposed.
> 
> I agree with you, however, that it lacks ambition

Exactly, that'd be a very small step after the manifesto.

> and doesn't tell us where we want to go in clear words. Finding that
> direction is a rather contentious topic, and it lead to great frustration
> among the people involved. There are a lot of different agenda's on the
> table, and very little room for compromise in the sense of "Okay, *that* is
> a really good idea and I think it's worthwhile pursuing, even if it's not
> why and what I'm working on under the KDE umbrella right now". I think we
> already are a more loose organisation than we would have thought (which can
> be fine).

And I think that's why I would at least in part disagree on your "We may well 
have outgrown the phase where we could come to a shared and clear direction 
for all of our software and the organisation".

Indeed it's likely impossible for all of our software (and that's a good thing 
for our ability to innovate). I think it's very much necessary and possible 
for the organization. What prevents it is the lack of culture of compromise 
which we have right now. It might stem from the rampant sense of lack of 
contributors we have across the board... but unfortunately it's a vicious 
circle IMO, as long as we lack this culture we'll have limited contributions.

If it wasn't so contentious at the moment with everyone wanting to push his 
personal agenda then we could say "OK, X is a really good idea, that's what 
we're going to pursue for the next five years". It's not like we'd proactively 
stop or prevent work on Y and Z, it's just that for the next five years we 
keep a closer eye on X and if we're in a place where we can give a hand for X 
we do a small gesture. A matter of good citizenship really.

If I would take a more concrete example coming from another organization. It's 
a bit how the Mozilla community acts (although it's more directive and less 
consensus based than I'd like). The main focus is clearly Firefox and so it 
shows in their communication and what naturally gets the lion share of the 
contributions. Still it doesn't prevent other initiatives like Voice, 
Thunderbird, etc. They're just currently not the main focus and that's OK. 
Tomorrow it could be something else becoming the main focus, yesterday it 
wasn't even Firefox (although it's been for a while now).

In fact, I think it's mostly with the strategy part that I got a problem. It 
doesn't feel like strategy at all to me. At least it's not giving the 
direction for the coming years I'd expect.

> On the other hand, the vision effort has lead to a couple of subprojects
> thinking more actively about this topic, and coming to more focused
> conclusions. Plasma is among those (I'm not naming that because it's the
> most shining example, just because it's what I know best), and I think
> *that* is a very good thing.

Definitely, I don't deny that, and it was very much needed anyway. It's just 
solving another problem than the original one we wanted to solve.

It's the meaning of my first email in this thread: what we got is an 
improvement, it's just doesn't seem to get us closer to solving what we wanted 
to solve in the first place.

Cheers.
-- 
Kévin Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net

KDAB - proud supporter of KDE, http://www.kdab.com
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