latest draft for mission (and strategy)

[Adriaan de Groot]

Hi Sebas,

On Monday 10 July 2017 13:00:09 Sebastian Kügler wrote:
>

[Rearranging your text quite freely]

> 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.

My first reaction is, unfortunately, that your questions will be as self-
selecting as the current discussion is: loud voices (yours included) will have 
an opinion, and those that don't care will continue to be silent.

> 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.

I'd like to hark back to some of the things Kevin wrote earlier in the thread. 
To bring a broad and diverse community together, a strategy -- that is, what 
should we be doing / supporting right now, to increase the chance of success 
of the current mission -- needs to be actionable, supportable, and non-
exclusionary.

"Actionable" here means there needs to be something we (some subset of the 
entire community) can *do*; a simple slogan "privacy!" is not actionable 
because there's no verb, no state to be reached. "Travel to Almeria" is 
actionable. "Add privacy settings to the central KDE settings and get at least 
60% of the applications released by KDE to obey them when sending (personal) 
data over the internet." is actionable as well.

"Supportable" means that the people directly working on the code, are not the 
only people involved. It needs to be possible to support the strategy (which 
supports the mission) without directly hacking on that one component. So it 
should be possible to crowd-source some of the actions: be it inventory of 
bugs, triage, user-testing, information, whatnot.

"Non-exclusionary" is the bit where we avoid saying "if you're not for this, 
you're against this." So that the don't-particularly-care crowd is not 
alienated by the strategy. That same crowd *probably* doesn't care much for 
the mission, either, but is fine with the status quo of doing stuff with things.


This is where "pushing one's agenda" becomes tricky. Tricky especially in a 
large and diverse community.


So recall, again, Kevin's call to make things forward-looking (not just 
describing the status quo) and especially for all involved to support whatever 
is chosen. Supporting here means at the least "not griping about it forever", 
and everything more than that is profit. It asks of the agenda-pushers to at 
least acknowledge "that's not my agenda, but it's a fine agenda to have."

If this sounds like I'm calling you out in particular: no. I could call myself 
out, because I have an mission: make KDE great on FreeBSD. I have a strategy: 
patch individual applications into ports until all of KDE Applications 
releases are in official ports. That agenda applies to a very, very small subset 
of the KDE community. If we pick a different strategy, a different agenda, I'm 
going to go "hey, that's cool, I will help if I can, and continue working on 
my own agenda as long as it doesn't disrupt the strategy."

So the call goes out to everyone; and the need is for a mission / strategy 
that can accomodate that kind of support.


Oh, and I'm right with you wrt. "this discussion is reaching the limits of 
what can be done in email".

[ade]