Hello, On Monday, 29 May 2017 21:17:29 CEST Lydia Pintscher wrote: > [...] > I'd like to invite you all to take a look at the current draft and > provide your constructive feedback so we can use this as the basis for > our work for the next years. > > https://community.kde.org/KDE/Mission
Took me quite some time to decide to look at the mission in more details and write a reply here. That's in part because I think I might bring doom and gloom in this thread. Indeed, I'm rather torn with it. There are two ways to look at it. 1) It can be seen *retrospectively* as a way to make the implicit more explicit. In that regard I think it's a success. As others in this thread mentioned it better than I could, I agree it summarizes quite excellently what we do. If what we were trying to achieve was make clear what we do, job is now done. Congrats everyone involved, it really wasn't easy at all to put into words what we've been doing for years. From that point of view, I would say I got only one small concern. The Mission seems to overlap with the Manifesto to some extent, which is likely fine. And, at the same time, neither the Vision or the Mission refers to the Manifesto which makes it seem somewhat isolated now. Also, the aim behind all those documents is to make explicit to outsiders our why, what and how... well, that's quite a few documents now. I wouldn't expect them to know how it all articulates and that probably needs addressing. I admit I'm not sure how. 2) It can also be seen from the angle of "what prompted the creation of the Vision and the Mission?", and did we actually achieve what we wanted when we started that process. That's where I think I'll be a pain for everyone involved. I'll recap the events which in my opinion started this soul searching. To me, it all goes back to Paul Adams' talk at Akademy 2014. If you don't remember it or didn't see it, I'll let you watch the video now: https://conf.kde.org/en/Akademy2014/public/events/167 I'll wait... You're done? OK, let's carry on. In short the conclusion was that the community was massively shrinking. To him it was likely because we lost focus, a shared technical vision and a shared tone (as he put it, I'd have put it differently I think, but let's not get into that). It then led to discussions of course. Who wouldn't want to fix that situation, right? Those discussions culminated to Lydia announcing the "Evolving KDE" effort in order to "reflect on where we as a community stand and where we want to go". And I think that's on Paul's conclusion and Lydia's initial goal, that the Vision and Mission should be judged. Do they both answer "where we as a community stand"? Obviously yes, see my first part in this email, by making the implicit explicit they definitely served that purpose. Do they both answer "where we want to go"? I hope not. Indeed, once more (i.e. like with the Manifesto), we're describing business as usual, just on a different level this time. So if our answer to "where we want to go" is: "nowhere in particular, we just like where we're standing now", then the job is done from Lydia's initial goal point of view. Still I honestly hate the answer since it won't solve one bit of what Paul pointed out three years ago. 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. Regards. -- Kévin Ottens, http://ervin.ipsquad.net KDAB - proud supporter of KDE, http://www.kdab.com
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