Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (229 mails)

[Jim Henderson <hendersj@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:11:49 +0100, Martin Schlander wrote:

> That is exactly what was on the openSUSE wiki frontpage for years.
>
> It was bad then, and it's even worse now, because "usable" is either
> just an empty phrase that can mean whatever anyone wants it to mean, or
> it means "Aunt Tillie distro" - which we have spent months establishing
> is a bad fit for openSUSE and doesn't reflect reality.

I don't entirely disagree with this, but I don't entirely agree with it 
either.

I think from the standpoint of a "mission statement", this is nice and 
concise.  What's important when you put a mission statement together, 
though, is that it be followed by definitions that help the reader 
understand what is meant if the language isn't clear (though ideally, 
that would be self-evident - in some cases that is easy to do, in others 
- like ours - I think it's less easy to do because of the complexity of 
what we're talking about).  

I think that's something I haven't entirely seen conveyed in the strategy 
discussion (though I got busy and have missed some of the discussion over 
the past few weeks).

Questions that a definition for "usable" needs to answer are:

 * For Whom? (ie, who is the target audience?)
 * How will we achieve that goal?
 * How will we measure our success in this area?

There are probably other questions that it should answer as well.

Jim

-- 
 Jim Henderson
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