latest draft for mission (and strategy)

[Sebastian Kügler]

On zondag 9 juli 2017 17:41:03 CEST Kevin Ottens wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Friday, 7 July 2017 23:16:32 CEST Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> > On 2017 M07 7, Fri 07:21:32 CEST Kevin Ottens wrote:
> > > > How about collecting ideas for that ?
> > > > We have already 5.
> > > 
> > > 5? I missed a couple I guess. I spotted only "privacy" and "freedom" so
> > > far.
> > 
> > For completeness:
> > - privacy
> > - (practical) freedom
> > - reliability
> > - KDE apps for Android - konquering mobile ;-)
> > - cross-platform KDE applications - konquering Windows and OSX ;-)
> 
> OK, I somehow didn't spot the last three in this thread. Thanks for digging
> them up then.
> 
> > > Note I'd be personally inclined to do an early filtering of them to
> > > avoid
> > > things which are way too generic and impossible to action. The reasoning
> > > being that if you line them up against more precise things they'd be
> > > picked up every time since they'd be more easily fitting larger
> > > groups...
> > > but they'd be counter-productive at building a direction.
> > 
> > +1
> > 
> > > One simple criterion for that could be "no single term proposal" because
> > > then you're just showing up a concept and that single word can be
> > > ambiguous enough to be misunderstood too. See for instance how I didn't
> > > quite complain about "privacy" but I did for "freedom", it's just than
> > > in
> > > one case I see a clear direction and actions we can take and not in the
> > > other one. Can be very different for someone else!
> > > 
> > > After all we're talking about selecting something like a 5 years
> > > strategy,
> > > I think it deserve more than just a word.
> > 
> > Maybe it could be even shorter like e.g. 2 years ?
> > 5 years feels like a very long time, 2 years feels plannable.
> 
> Somehow 2 years feel a bit short to me, this kind of "aim for the moon"
> goals require quite some time, especially in a community of mostly
> volunteers working on their spare time.
> 
> But at least to me we identified two things which need to be found before we
> can put in place a proper approach to try to really tackle our original
> problem:
>  1) how to build the strategy consensus when the time comes?
>  2) at which frequency do we want to look for the next strategy or decide to
> continue the current one?
> 
> Once we got those two answered then we can probably kick start this for the
> first strategy, likely with the five you mentioned above being evaluated.
> 
> Of course, I'm writing this assuming I'm not mistaken the document as we
> have right now won't be able to cut it. If everyone is fine with it and I'm
> alone thinking there's a problem I don't want to bully the community into
> more soul searching (although it looks like we did the most painful work
> and what I'm proposing sounds simpler... famous last words).

I personally don't feel bullied at all, I think we've laid out some basics, 
but we could definitely enhance that with more direction.

I do think that this mailinglist is the wrong medium at this point, though. 
Especially the discussions around vision, mission and strategy have become a 
bit of a repetitive echo chamber (the tail end of this thread is better, 
though), where the same people repeat the same opinions without much progress 
on a clear direction. A few loud voices (mine included) won't budge much and 
are trying to push their agenda's, the rest has long stopped caring. That 
isn't good at all.

It just occurred to me, that it would be good at this point to gauge with the 
active community what a mission would be, some simple questions such as:

- Have you been contributing in any significant way to KDE in the past year?   
  (And how?)
- Which of the proposed strategical directions would you support most?

Could give us a way to break out from this circle and tell us what the people 
who actually matter think, and what strategy could gain momentum. I think it 
would provide us with a much stronger decision base and increase the quality 
of any strategical direction a lot.

Thoughts?
-- 
sebas

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