Re: GNOME SWOT Analysis

[Claus Schwarm <clschwarm googlemail com>]

On Thu, 2010-04-01 at 01:35 +0200, Juanjo Marin wrote:
> Hi !
> 
> 
> On the public IRC Board of Directors meeting [1] was disscused the topic
> "Strategic roadmap for GNOME: long term goals". One of the actions
> agreed was to write a SWOT analysis for generating ideas for strategy
> and I was charged of this.
> 
> Here you are the document [2]. I've tried to get together all the
> concerns about the GNOME project I've found everywhere.
> 

Hi, Juanjo!

I think you've done quite a good job! Especially concerning the
concerns... I was amazed reading that someone thought about all these.
And I really like how you tried to link each SWOT point to a certain
objective or attribute.

Congrats! :-)

If you don't mind, here are a few suggestions you may want to consider
in later revisions of the document:

== Mission Statement ==

Instead of copying from web pages, a reformulation of GNOME's goal would
be nice. I admit it's sort of scattered across different sites, but the
goal in broad terms is not so complicated. Here's a suggestion:

  "to provide a desktop environment and development platform for
personal computers, as well as mobile and embedded devises, that is Free
Software, Open Source, and usable for people all over the world." 

The last one is basically a short cut for proper Usability,
Accessibility, Internationalization and Localization.

What GNOME is, is often just a secondary goal, in my opinion -- a means
to an end. For example, there's no inherent value in being 'supported'
unless you need to be supported to reach some other goals.

(Strictly speaking, the above formulation still lacks something,
otherwise we already reached all goals and everybody could go home right
now. It's obviously insufficient to just 'provide' certain things.)


== SWOT Matrix ==

Following the Wikipedia article about SWOT analyses, the four areas are
basically defined as

  * internal, helpful conditions 
  * internal, harmful conditions 
  * external, helpful conditions 
  * external, harmful conditions 

... to achieve the objective(s).

Under this definitions, you may want to reconsider some points in your
analysis. 

Some examples:

  * "Free Software" is hardly an "internal, helpful condition" to
achieve the objective(s). In fact, it's part of the objective, thus it
can't be a strength.

  * The same holds for "Good internalization support" and "Good
Accessibility support". This is more of a status description.

  * "GNOME brand is known in the FLOSS world." is more of an external,
helpful condition.

  * "Aspire to be the platform of choice for opportunistic desktop
developers." is hardly an external condition. It's, dunno, another
secondary objective or so...

  * "APIs and ABIs changes no scheduled in enough advance..." is
certainly something internal, not external, since we do the scheduling,
no?

However, it's a very good start! Hope you're going to spend some more
time on this. Can't wait to read your next revisions. :-)


Regards,
Claus