Re: GNOME SWOT Analysis
On Thu, 2010-04-01 at 08:30 +0200, Claus Schwarm wrote: Hi Claus ! I think you've done quite a good job! Especially concerning the concerns... I was amazed reading that someone thought about all these. And I really like how you tried to link each SWOT point to a certain objective or attribute. Well, thanks for the nice words, but I only put on a paper all the concerns I've found everywhere :) If you don't mind, here are a few suggestions you may want to consider in later revisions of the document: == Mission Statement == Instead of copying from web pages, a reformulation of GNOME's goal would be nice. I admit it's sort of scattered across different sites, but the goal in broad terms is not so complicated. Here's a suggestion: to provide a desktop environment and development platform for personal computers, as well as mobile and embedded devises, that is Free Software, Open Source, and usable for people all over the world. The last one is basically a short cut for proper Usability, Accessibility, Internationalization and Localization. What GNOME is, is often just a secondary goal, in my opinion -- a means to an end. For example, there's no inherent value in being 'supported' unless you need to be supported to reach some other goals. (Strictly speaking, the above formulation still lacks something, otherwise we already reached all goals and everybody could go home right now. It's obviously insufficient to just 'provide' certain things.) I totally agree that our mission statement should be revisited and updated. It would be great if we have a better mission statement for the new website. Hey marketing folks, what do you think ?. Can we start a new threat to discuss this ?. == SWOT Matrix == Under this definitions, you may want to reconsider some points in your analysis. Some examples: * Free Software is hardly an internal, helpful condition to achieve the objective(s). In fact, it's part of the objective, thus it can't be a strength. Hmm, I see your point, but GNOME is free software, what we want is to deliver this freedom to all the users. All our pieces of software are free and we support other free software projects. You can say that we have a free software culture or something like that. * The same holds for Good internalization support and Good Accessibility support. This is more of a status description. Well, I have to put some things on the strengh areas for making feel us better just joking :P We have control about the i18n support and we are delivering GNOME in a lot of languages. We have control about this and it is working moderately well. Windows XP have support to 19 languages, GNOME have support to many languages, 34 languages have 90% or more of its interface translated. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb688176.aspx http://l10n.gnome.org/releases/gnome-2-30/ The same goes with a11y. I put this on the strengh part because we are using a lot of technologies made in GNOME, like AT-SPI or Orca -with Sun Microsystems support- for giving a11y support. We are leading a11y support on the free desktop. http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/comparision.php * GNOME brand is known in the FLOSS world. is more of an external, helpful condition. About the GNOME brand, it is true that can be situated on other place. This sort of strengh is to indicate that we have a brand, though I have indicated weaknesses areas related with branding. * Aspire to be the platform of choice for opportunistic desktop developers. is hardly an external condition. It's, dunno, another secondary objective or so... I don't think this objetive is so secondary. If someone want to do a small program, we want that this person thinks about using GNOME for doing that. Our users are also developers ;) * APIs and ABIs changes no scheduled in enough advance... is certainly something internal, not external, since we do the scheduling, no? Distributions don't know in enough advance when we are going to commit such changes in GNOME (we don't have rules about this). For example, Ubuntu has Long Term Support editions, and they should know when we are going to make big changes because releases after big changes are usually more buggy. Moreover, there have been some debate about cadence, and GNOME can contribute to help on this http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/290 Distributions are our main way to deliver our free desktop to our users, we can make easier their job, we are helping ourselves Best regards, -- Juanjo Marin -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME SWOT Analysis
On Thu, 2010-04-01 at 03:59 +0100, Nelson Marques wrote: I'm doing something already for some time with Stephano in the Fedora Project. Though it's still a bit stopped now (due to goddard release), I can provide some guidance help on that. I've done already SWOT's in the past (for the Portuguese Footwear Industry, ACAPO and am doing one for the Aveiro City Hall - Municipal Stadium Administration). I am not sure on how you pretend to accomplish this, basically I've made a small document for Strength's: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/SWOT_STR which will be complemented by the community (currently working on the communication email). But this is probably only going to happen after F13 release. Anything ring my bell. I'm not dead, though due to the nature of some personal issues and some overload from Fedora release I'm a bit more away from this list. It's great you have experience on SWOT analysis. I like your early stage SWOT analysis for Fedora. I only want to help to improve the strategic management of GNOME. If we finally define how to work on strategy and when to revisit the SWOT document again, I'm sure you can help on this. Best regards, -- Juanjo -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME SWOT Analysis
On Thu, 2010-04-01 at 01:35 +0200, Juanjo Marin wrote: Hi ! On the public IRC Board of Directors meeting [1] was disscused the topic Strategic roadmap for GNOME: long term goals. One of the actions agreed was to write a SWOT analysis for generating ideas for strategy and I was charged of this. Here you are the document [2]. I've tried to get together all the concerns about the GNOME project I've found everywhere. Hi, Juanjo! I think you've done quite a good job! Especially concerning the concerns... I was amazed reading that someone thought about all these. And I really like how you tried to link each SWOT point to a certain objective or attribute. Congrats! :-) If you don't mind, here are a few suggestions you may want to consider in later revisions of the document: == Mission Statement == Instead of copying from web pages, a reformulation of GNOME's goal would be nice. I admit it's sort of scattered across different sites, but the goal in broad terms is not so complicated. Here's a suggestion: to provide a desktop environment and development platform for personal computers, as well as mobile and embedded devises, that is Free Software, Open Source, and usable for people all over the world. The last one is basically a short cut for proper Usability, Accessibility, Internationalization and Localization. What GNOME is, is often just a secondary goal, in my opinion -- a means to an end. For example, there's no inherent value in being 'supported' unless you need to be supported to reach some other goals. (Strictly speaking, the above formulation still lacks something, otherwise we already reached all goals and everybody could go home right now. It's obviously insufficient to just 'provide' certain things.) == SWOT Matrix == Following the Wikipedia article about SWOT analyses, the four areas are basically defined as * internal, helpful conditions * internal, harmful conditions * external, helpful conditions * external, harmful conditions ... to achieve the objective(s). Under this definitions, you may want to reconsider some points in your analysis. Some examples: * Free Software is hardly an internal, helpful condition to achieve the objective(s). In fact, it's part of the objective, thus it can't be a strength. * The same holds for Good internalization support and Good Accessibility support. This is more of a status description. * GNOME brand is known in the FLOSS world. is more of an external, helpful condition. * Aspire to be the platform of choice for opportunistic desktop developers. is hardly an external condition. It's, dunno, another secondary objective or so... * APIs and ABIs changes no scheduled in enough advance... is certainly something internal, not external, since we do the scheduling, no? However, it's a very good start! Hope you're going to spend some more time on this. Can't wait to read your next revisions. :-) Regards, Claus -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
GNOME SWOT Analysis
Hi ! On the public IRC Board of Directors meeting [1] was disscused the topic Strategic roadmap for GNOME: long term goals. One of the actions agreed was to write a SWOT analysis for generating ideas for strategy and I was charged of this. Here you are the document [2]. I've tried to get together all the concerns about the GNOME project I've found everywhere. This kind of documment is a high level one, not technical. I think a good starting point for defining the strategy lines. So now we can start to discuss the actions we can affort to improve the situation. There are a few on going efforts on areas where SWOT analysis points to. Please, relink existing efforts into the action plan with its status, roadmaps, etc. There are a lot of marketing related staff that I think it is worth to be discussed on this list. I'm going to send a message like this to the desktop-devel-list and the foundation-list as well, so if you want to discuss a something about development or more general issues go to these lists instead. Of course, it is impossible to improve everything at once, so there will be areas where we can focus on the near future and other ones will be left for later. After that, we will write a document about the strategic lines we are working. I think it is a s good idea to find a person to be in charge of the evolution of every strategic line. There are some open issues about the management of the strategic lines that I hope we can discuss now (if we need to define a strategy-making body, when we have to evaluate again the situation, how to sync the strategic lines with our releases, etc). Best regards, -- Juanjo Marin [1] http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/IRC20100227 [2] http://live.gnome.org/SWOT -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: GNOME SWOT Analysis
I'm doing something already for some time with Stephano in the Fedora Project. Though it's still a bit stopped now (due to goddard release), I can provide some guidance help on that. I've done already SWOT's in the past (for the Portuguese Footwear Industry, ACAPO and am doing one for the Aveiro City Hall - Municipal Stadium Administration). I am not sure on how you pretend to accomplish this, basically I've made a small document for Strength's: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing/SWOT_STR which will be complemented by the community (currently working on the communication email). But this is probably only going to happen after F13 release. Anything ring my bell. I'm not dead, though due to the nature of some personal issues and some overload from Fedora release I'm a bit more away from this list. nm On Thu, 2010-04-01 at 01:35 +0200, Juanjo Marin wrote: Hi ! On the public IRC Board of Directors meeting [1] was disscused the topic Strategic roadmap for GNOME: long term goals. One of the actions agreed was to write a SWOT analysis for generating ideas for strategy and I was charged of this. Here you are the document [2]. I've tried to get together all the concerns about the GNOME project I've found everywhere. This kind of documment is a high level one, not technical. I think a good starting point for defining the strategy lines. So now we can start to discuss the actions we can affort to improve the situation. There are a few on going efforts on areas where SWOT analysis points to. Please, relink existing efforts into the action plan with its status, roadmaps, etc. There are a lot of marketing related staff that I think it is worth to be discussed on this list. I'm going to send a message like this to the desktop-devel-list and the foundation-list as well, so if you want to discuss a something about development or more general issues go to these lists instead. Of course, it is impossible to improve everything at once, so there will be areas where we can focus on the near future and other ones will be left for later. After that, we will write a document about the strategic lines we are working. I think it is a s good idea to find a person to be in charge of the evolution of every strategic line. There are some open issues about the management of the strategic lines that I hope we can discuss now (if we need to define a strategy-making body, when we have to evaluate again the situation, how to sync the strategic lines with our releases, etc). Best regards, -- Juanjo Marin [1] http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/IRC20100227 [2] http://live.gnome.org/SWOT -- Nelson Marques Private Contact- 07...@ipam.pt -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
