Last year I went to Akademy with two notebooks and sharpies and asked people to draw or write about one thing they think would make KDE better. This year I did the same again. The question was: “What’s the one thing KDE should do to have more impact?” Here are some of the great results:
The complete set is in this Flickr album. Check it out! What’s your favorite? What’s your one thing – big or small – that would help KDE have more impact?
One of the outcomes of the survey we did for Evolving KDE was that we need to get more clarity on our vision, strategy and focus. At Akademy we had many discussions to explore more how we all see this topic. We discussed what different contributors think KDE’s vision and focus should be. We tried to clarify what it actually means for KDE to have a vision, strategy and focus. And we talked about ways to get to a vision that would work for KDE.
Here’s a visualization of how I see the different parts fitting together:
Some time ago we created KDE’s manifesto. It answers the question “Who are we?”. What we need to work out now is our vision. It will answer the questions “What do we aspire to do?”. Different teams inside KDE can then in addition find their own local vision which can overlap more or less with the global one. The manifesto and the vision together will give us a framework in which we can develop our strategy. The strategy gives us the answer to the question how we want to go about achieving our vision. From the strategy we can derive a number of concrete actions that will get us closer to where we want to be.
The goal of all this is to give us clarity on who we are, what we do, why we do it and what everyone’s part in the big picture is.
Over the next weeks we will summarize the different ideas and thoughts concerning the vision that were brought up at Akademy and open it up for wider input and discussion. We will also hold another office hour on IRC. Depending on how all this goes we will have a sprint to work on it more.
As part of Evolving KDE we have done a survey to get a better understanding of where we are, where we want to go and how we get there. I published a summary of the responses. Based on this I recommend a number of actions:
The first point – develop our vision, strategy and focus – is crucial in order for KDE to move forward. When KDE started our goal was very clear: create a desktop environment and applications for end-users on Linux. But both KDE and the world around us has changed considerably since 1996. KDE has moved from being software to being a community. The world has rapidly moved towards more technology platforms (mobile, web, internet of things, …). In this transition we partially lost a shared vision that we can build a strategy on and that helps us focus our efforts. Without a clear and articulated vision we lack a frame of reference to make decisions in which makes taking these decisions considerably more difficult and sometimes painful. We need to change this and get back a shared vision so we have clarity, can focus our efforts and truly bring free and open technology to our users. We live in a time where free and open technology is crucial for everyone. We can only provide this if we have vision, strategy and focus for the work we do.
Once we have this shared vision and strategy we can have a look at the initiatives and products we have and decide which ones we should put more effort into and where our focus should be. This doesn’t mean that we will stop the rest. But it will guide our work, resources and communication. We get to say “More of this!” to the things that are important to us.
With more clarity gained through the first two steps we can then go and tackle the remaining three points. We will improve our recruiting and on-boarding processes and documentation. We need to analyze where and why people are struggling to get on board and then remove or lower these barriers together. We will simplify and clarify our main web-presence to match our vision, strategy and focus. And we will develop ideas and processes to make better use of all our communication media (social media, dot, etc).
Over the next days I will publish the next steps for finding our shared vision, strategy and focus as well as some clarification of what exactly I mean with these.
