Re: Mission Statement

[Mathieu Duponchelle <mduponchelle1 gmail com>]

Women do represent a pretty significant portion of the general public, no? I think for men by men probably doesn't meet the "general public" qualifier there.

"Standalone OPW" is different from "from men by men", I'm afraid I don't understand your argument here?

A problem I see in the current debate is that we all argue quite subjectively, and have no metrics for quantifying OPW's potential positive impact on the GNOME project. We do on the other had have financial and operational metrics that suggest that OPW in recent times had had a less positive impact.

To me, the problem looks indeed clear, and can be stated that way:

If outreach is considered to be an end goal of the GNOME project, then it should be included in the mission statement.

If on the other hand we consider it to only be a tool to serve GNOME's mission, we should quantify together as best as we can its impact on the project, and if it is found to be detrimental, stop managing it ourselves. People can then step up to the challenge of creating a foundation with outreach as a mission statement.

I personally think the GNOME foundation's main role should be to ensure its current mission statement, and outreach should only be a tool, not the end goal.

With respects to metrics, I am sure we can find ways to quantify engagement in terms of commit percentages per gender in time for example (I know the problem here lies in finding out the gender for a given commit author, just an idea).

On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 5:16 AM, Máirín Duffy <duffy fedoraproject org> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 8:39 PM, Jim Nelson <jim yorba org> wrote:

... except that all four of those projects correspond almost exactly to the first sentence of the GNOME mission statement that Ryan quoted: "to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software."

I think OPW is a fantastic program and, from what I've seen, it's netted GNOME a good deal of positive publicity and goodwill, on top of the fact that it's addressing one of the more glaring problems in the software industry today. 

That said, studying the mission statement and considering Ryan's concerns, I think he's raising some valid questions.

Women do represent a pretty significant portion of the general public, no? I think for men by men probably doesn't meet the "general public" qualifier there.

~m

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