Hi everyone, last year I have started to push for KDE to gain more clarity about a few key questions that we need to answer. These include such important things like: What is it that we are trying to achieve? How do we want the world of tomorrow to be different from how it is today?
When KDE started, this was much clearer for us than it is today. Without this clarity many decisions become hard. We do not have a clear frame of reference to make choices in. It makes our messaging to the outside world harder. Having a clearly defined “why?” again will help us attract new talent to help us reach our goals. The need for an answer to these questions was one of the key findings of the survey we did last year as part of Evolving KDE (http://evolve.kde.org). At Akademy in A Coruña I presented those results and put out a call to action to work on this over the coming year. At Akademy we had a lot of discussions in workshops, in the hallways and during the nights. Since then further discussions happened on mailing lists and IRC. A small team has now sat down and condensed all this input into a first draft for a vision statement. It is intended to guide us by clearly stating what we are trying to achieve and to what end goal we are working to change the world for the better. It intentionally is not supposed to codify how we are doing that - that is left to the mission statement we can work on next. It is also intentionally not meant to define who we are as our manifesto (http://manifesto.kde.org) already covers that. The first draft reads as follows: "KDE, through the creation of Free software, enables users to control their digital life. KDE software enables privacy, makes simple things easy and complex scenarios possible while crossing device boundaries." Here is how we believe this relates to a few subgroups in KDE and related projects: KDE PIM: KDE PIM software enables privacy in communication around open standards. In complex scenarios, it allows “casual users” to use complex functionality, such as encryption and thereby enables them to lead a more private life. KDE Edu: KDE Edu enables teaching in schools, universities and at home using free and open technology. Introducing people to open technology early on is vital to not lock them in to a proprietary system. The technology they grow up with will have a big influence on the technology they are familiar with and will use later in their life. Plasma: Plasma allows to access computers in a fundamental way, by providing the interface to the computer. The base system shell is enhanced by functionality that give access to many functions, such as search, starting applications, etc.. None of these are designed to spy on the user, or share data without clear consent of the user. Plasma provides an alternative for systems that do spy and restrict the user. It is designed to make the whole thing easy and efficient to use. KDE Games: KDE games allow users to enjoy the experience of games without locking themselves into the restrictive worlds of DRM and controlled online platforms, and without giving their data away to gaming companies. It keeps them from accepting the often pretty tough restrictions that proprietary games impose on them as an unavoidable fact which may be transferred to other areas of the digital life as well. WikiToLearn WikiToLearn brings collaborative and accessible textbooks to the world. These books allow students and professors to choose their own path towards knowledge, through personalization and customization of the learning material. WikiToLearn also makes it easy to set-up complex learning environments, e.g. a Linux desktop to learn how to develop free software. All our content is accessible on every platform (even paper!). Konsole: Konsole is the ultimate power-user tool that gives the user control over the whole system. Mentoring: Mentoring is a crucial activity in KDE because it empowers people. We teach them how they can influence technology and thereby their life in a profound way. Community activities: Promotion, system administration, user support etc. all serve the goal as “supporting services”. In order to fulfill its goals, KDE needs infrastructure. This infrastructure should adhere to the same set of principles as the software KDE produces, but ultimately, fulfilling our goals is more important than doing it the right way. This means that KDE should give preference to open and Free tools, but should not let itself be limited by them. Qt: Qt is our base technology of choice, as it’s the most promising tool to achieve our goals, while aligning with our values and core principles of Free software and open development processes, while maintaining a high quality. KDE software contains lots of Qt’s DNA, yet Qt is not what defines us, but Qt expresses very well how we want to achieve our goals. A decision whether or not a KDE project uses Qt is a choice driven by pragmatism, and in fact, Qt has a lot going for it: It’s very high quality, performs well, allows us to reach many platforms and devices and it allows us to participate in its development. In some cases, using Qt may be the wrong choice, and that is completely fine. Qt is not our goal or purpose, it’s is ‘just’ one of our most important tools to realize our goals. I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this to make sure we can collectively agree on this or some modified version as the representation of why we are here. Thank you to all the people who have helped clarify the thinking around this so far - among them: Cornelius, Paul, Kevin, Vishesh, Boud and Alexander. Cheers Lydia, Sebas, Riccardo, Thomas, Valorie, Clemens -- Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher KDE e.V. Board of Directors / KDE Community Working Group http://kde.org - http://open-advice.org _______________________________________________ kde-community mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
