Proposal: Have the Community Set Ambitious Goals for Itself

[Kevin Ottens]

Dear Community,

Based on the mission and strategy discussions on this list and during Akademy, 
some of the Akademy attendees had a BoF where they discussed topics like 
direction, cohesion, creativity, and ambition.

The outcome of that discussion is that we would like to suggest a bottom-up 
process aiming at finding concrete goals to work towards.

The suggestion is to set up a yearly tradition to collect a number of goals 
from the contributor community, then determine the three most important topics 
(via a vote) and push them forward until completion.

To give you an idea of the type of goals the community could come up with, 
here are a few made up examples:
  - Improving the Developer Story: a new contributor should be able to create 
his first patch to any KDE application in 15 minutes or less;
  - Big in Asia: users in Asia should be able to write in their writing system 
in any of the software produced by KDE;
  - Appeal to All our Senses: a visually impaired user should be able to use 
all the software produced by KDE;
  - Virtual Reality Painting: artists should be able to paint in 3D straight 
from a VR world using software produced by KDE;
  - Speaking Your Language: 90% of the computer users worldwide should be able 
to use the software produced by KDE in a language in which they are fluent.

What we are trying to achieve with this proposal is aligning the community 
efforts and attracting new contributors. Of course, that doesn't mean that a 
contributor not interested in a particular goal would be forced to work on it.

That's why the main purpose of getting your proposal to be highly-voted is the 
exposure and attention that it will receive from the wider community. In 
addition, the 3 most popular proposals will be supported by sponsorship for a 
sprint and an opportunity to present at the next Akademy.

Concretely, the process would look like this:
 1) groups of people get together to write proposals;
 2) proposals would be announced to the community;
 3) a discussion period of one month would then follow;
 4) every contributor (as defined by the contributor flag in KDE identity 
server) can then vote for the proposals, by sorting them by order of 
preference;
 5) the result of the vote is the final sorted list.

A good proposal would include a rationale, would give an indication of the 
feasibility, should be ambitious while being reachable in less than 4 years 
and would ideally not come from a single person but a group of contributors.

We think this approach would do a great deal to foster innovation and join our 
efforts. Let's kick start this tradition together and celebrate all the great 
ideas floating in the community, shall we?

Cheers!
-- 
Kévin Ottens
Lydia Pintscher
Mirko Boehm
David Faure
Frederik Gladhorn

Signed off by:
Sandro S. Andrade
Albert Astals Cid
Scarlett Clark
Christoph Cullmann
David Edmundson
Timothée Giet
Adriaan de Groot
Dominik Haumann
Eike Hein
Ingo Klöcker
Sebastian Kügler
Dan Leinir
Marco Martin
Jos van den Oever
Aleix Pol
Jonathan Riddell
Bhushan Shah
Harald Sitter
Daniel Vrátil
Valorie Zimmerman
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/attachments/20170725/653ce3ec/attachment.sig>