Re: Mission Statement

[Máirín Duffy <duffy fedoraproject org>]

On 08/07/2014 12:06 AM, Mathieu Duponchelle wrote:
>     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?
I am happy to clarify. Here is my argument:

- There are financial concerns / problems.
- There are concerns about OPW's alignment with GNOME's mission statement

If there are financial concerns, let's continue to go through the actual 
data and see if there is a way to solve them.
Let's not conflate whether or not OPW has anything to do with the 
mission statement or not; if there was a problem with alignment to the 
mission statement I would have expected that to be brought up quite some 
time ago, and would hope it would be brought up without the added issue 
of financial concerns if it was truly a sincere concern.
In the absence of a program like OPW, sadly, it is for men by men, we 
have historical figures to demonstrate this.
If you want to take a project that is successfully increasing the number 
of female participants in GNOME and open source in general and 
disassociate it from the project while, at the same time, talking about 
how there are financial issues and not enough money to hire more help 
then you are essentially killing the program. If the program cannot 
continue to operate without the help from the GNOME foundation that it 
is currently getting (whether or not that is sustainable long-term,) you 
are setting the program back.
You can not just say, let's take OPW out of this GNOME box and give it 
its owm box and believe that it won't negatively impact the broader 
program and its ability to continue its success while you are also 
bringing up financial issues that would make the program impossible to 
run outside of GNOME's box.
I hope this clarifies my point and I hope the discussion can continue to 
focus around the financial issues and work through potential solutions 
to those and put aside the 'mission statement' argument. I do not see 
any conflict with the current mission statement, and changing the 
mission statement appears to not solve the real issue at hand anyway.
~m