Re: latest draft for mission (and strategy)

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi Agustin,

On Tuesday, May 30, 2017 4:07:37 PM CEST Agustin Benito (toscalix) wrote:
> thanks for driving this discussion. It is a needed one. Here are my
> early comments:
> 
> * "builds on open standards to prevent "lock-in" - I think that
> prevent lock-in is not a reason but a consequence of building KDE
> software on open standards. open stardars are aabout transparency,
> agreement, provenance...

That makes it too vague in my opinion. Preventing lock-in is a tangible 
benefit for our users, it is in fact why many instituional users choose Free 
software over proprietary offerings. We should call it by its name to make 
clear why we do this, and why users want and need it.

> * "provides usable security and privacy features to protect against
> surveillance and data theft" there is legal surveillance that we do
> not want to prevent. In any case, privacy is a right challenged in our
> digital era like was not challenged before, in the analogic era. Is
> the right to privacy the central point, not the prevention against
> data theft. You can prevent your data from being stolen through
> proprietary software too, among other options.

Legal says exactly nothing, since it's bound to a jurisdiction, a concept 
which doesn't exactly work in the internet era. Something can be legal in a 
given location, yet morally wrong. Also, we're not judging (a Free software 
principle), we're allowing privacy, full stop.

> * "have consistent, easy to use human interfaces" and "provide a
> seamless user experience" seems to me close enough to justify that we
> condense them in a single statement.

One is about the interface quality itself, the other is about a cross-device 
experience, I think they warrant separate mentioning to make the mission less 
fluffy and more concrete.

> * I would be carefull with the words "integration" and
> "interoperates". In order to work well, both concepts requires two
> parties. We cannot guarantee any of them by ourselves.

We can strive for it, however. Nothing wrong with that.

> * Linked with the above, this statement is a set up for failure:
> "interoperates well with proprietary software, formats and services" .
> In simple words, it is not in our hands to provide a satisfactory
> experience when dealing with proprietary software/formats/services. I
> would re-formulate this in a way that reflects that we will do our
> best.

Again, I think it's absolutely sound to state that we want our software to 
work well with proprietary offerings. It provides real value to users and 
again makes it clearer why we do what we do.

> * "empowers users independent of their abilities" I find this
> statement vague. How are we going to empower them? what for? why it is
> so important for us to empower software users? I would try to develop
> it a little.

How? :)

> * I have a fundamental issue with the whole "user story". We are
> upstream. We only reach 0.1% of our currrent users directly. We live
> in an industry that has "downstream", that is, integrators and
> distributors. I truly believe that one of our limiting factors is our
> belief that we can reach users "by ourselves", through direct
> interaction. This idea, which is popular in our community, has its
> reflection in this Mission statement. No mention to any collaboration
> with dowsntream in this section, to reach users.

While we are upstream, we're responsible for the largest part of the user 
experience, we develop the software, we create the UI, we fix the bugs that 
annoy people.

> I have been fighting this widespread belief since I joined in 2005.
> Our situation is worse today than ever was, in my opinion. I would
> really like to see ourselves turning the situation upside down, which
> can start by discussing and ultimately reflecting in this Mission
> statement how important it is for us the ecosystem that allow us to
> bring our software to user's hands.

Please elaborate what you want to do, and how. Your statement is really vague 
and I fail to make sense of it, possibly others have the same problem.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org

Re: latest draft for mission (and strategy)

[Agustin Benito (toscalix)]

Hi,

thanks for driving this discussion. It is a needed one. Here are my
early comments:

* "builds on open standards to prevent "lock-in" - I think that
prevent lock-in is not a reason but a consequence of building KDE
software on open standards. open stardars are aabout transparency,
agreement, provenance...

* "provides usable security and privacy features to protect against
surveillance and data theft" there is legal surveillance that we do
not want to prevent. In any case, privacy is a right challenged in our
digital era like was not challenged before, in the analogic era. Is
the right to privacy the central point, not the prevention against
data theft. You can prevent your data from being stolen through
proprietary software too, among other options.

* "have consistent, easy to use human interfaces" and "provide a
seamless user experience" seems to me close enough to justify that we
condense them in a single statement.

* I would be carefull with the words "integration" and
"interoperates". In order to work well, both concepts requires two
parties. We cannot guarantee any of them by ourselves.

* Linked with the above, this statement is a set up for failure:
"interoperates well with proprietary software, formats and services" .
In simple words, it is not in our hands to provide a satisfactory
experience when dealing with proprietary software/formats/services. I
would re-formulate this in a way that reflects that we will do our
best.

* "empowers users independent of their abilities" I find this
statement vague. How are we going to empower them? what for? why it is
so important for us to empower software users? I would try to develop
it a little.

* I have a fundamental issue with the whole "user story". We are
upstream. We only reach 0.1% of our currrent users directly. We live
in an industry that has "downstream", that is, integrators and
distributors. I truly believe that one of our limiting factors is our
belief that we can reach users "by ourselves", through direct
interaction. This idea, which is popular in our community, has its
reflection in this Mission statement. No mention to any collaboration
with dowsntream in this section, to reach users.

I have been fighting this widespread belief since I joined in 2005.
Our situation is worse today than ever was, in my opinion. I would
really like to see ourselves turning the situation upside down, which
can start by discussing and ultimately reflecting in this Mission
statement how important it is for us the ecosystem that allow us to
bring our software to user's hands.

Best Regards
Agustin Benito (toscalix)
KDE eV member
Profile: http://es.linkedin.com/in/toscalix


On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 4:17 AM, Lydia Pintscher  wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> Last year we have talked a lot about KDE's vision, fleshed it out and
> wrote it down: https://community.kde.org/KDE/Vision I am proud that we
> have done that. However the work does not end there. We have the
> answer to the question "why are we here". We still need the answer to
> the question "how do we achieve our vision". We've had an insightful
> survery among our community and users and a lot of discussions around
> that. This was then all further discussed in a sessions at QtCon in
> Berlin. After that smaller groups have sat down to take all the input
> and refine it, but then the process got stuck for several reasons. At
> the last board meeting the board and sebas sat down again and looked
> at where we are wrt distilling all the input. It turns out we are less
> far away than we thought. We took the input from the session at
> Akademy and polished the wording slightly. We then analyzed it more
> and figured out the issue that had been bugging us with the existing
> draft: It was mixing mission and strategy. We split it up and this
> seems to work much better.
>
> 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
>
>
> Cheers
> Lydia
>
> --
> Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
> KDE e.V. Board of Directors / KDE Community Working Group
> http://kde.org - http://open-advice.org