On Tuesday 29 June 2010 14:12:42 Guido Berhoerster wrote:
* Martin Schlander <martin.schlander@gmail.com> [2010-06-29 13:44]:
Tirsdag den 29. juni 2010 13:12:30 skrev Guido Berhoerster:
I find this one exemplary for the arbitraryness of the whole strategy debate which seems to be centered around the notion that having a new stratgey is an end in itself while completely disregarding the existing community structure and the needs and preferences of users and contributors. Of course you can adopt a strategy in a top-down fashion, but who is going to sustain it at the end, Novell employees?
That's going a bit far I think. The strategy proposals are discussed openly and build upon an analysis of existing strenghts, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (swot) after all. So it's not really a top-down thing, and it's not completely disregarding existing reality either.
Yes, that is published and IIRC there was also an user survey, so there is some data (whatever its quality is) on current strengths, weaknesses and the userbase as well.
But I do agree that all the proposals are going from one extreme to the other. From basically having no explicit strategy/direction/mission whatsoever, to having an extremely narrow focus. And that is also going way too far :-)
Yes, they were about picking one arbitray, narrow focus from the list, explicitly at the expense of others. It treats the different objectives as mutually exclusive when they are not and neglects the fact that voluntary contributors cannot be shuffled around the project at will but have very diverse motivations and objectives which might clash with such a narrow strategy.
We came up with these three large proposals and first tried to "blend" them together but could not find directly a really good combination, so decided to publish these as "pure" strategies. We have two traps - a too narrow strategy and a too broad one. If somebody likes to propose a merging of two strategies, please go ahead and propose a new "blended" strategy. Regarding too broad: Let's be practical: Whom do we design the default installation for? Whom do we want to reach with the openSUSE wiki entrance page? If we are too broad, we reach nobody because everybody feels lost. So, what's the right balance? Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Program Manager openSUSE, aj@{novell.com,opensuse.org} Twitter: jaegerandi | Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126