Re: [libreoffice-marketing] LibO Mission Statement ? [was: Briefing]

On Wed, 2010-11-17 at 00:18 +0100, Bernhard Dippold wrote:

> > Develop an office productivity solution and make it and the project
> > itself available to and accessible by a majority of humans.
>
> Create and maintain a community of individuals and groups working 
> collaboratively on different aspects of this development.

Or:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Maximize the availability and the quality of the user experience of an
office productivity solution for a majority of humans.

Maximize the enjoyment and productivity within the project.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Notes:
- The solutions in our hands isn't the goal, the solution in the user's
hands is.
- There's no actual solution, but just potential, until the user does
use it, which makes it necessary that he needs or wants to and knows
how.
- Maximizing productivity may encompass winning over as many
contributors as possible and making the most of their time and effort.
- Happy people may be more productive and increasing enjoyment could be
treated as measure to increase productivity. But who would want to be
productive without feeling good?



> > It follows:
> > - Given our modern needs, there needs to be software
> > - Internationalization
> > - Free Software
> > - All major platforms
> > - Interoperability
> >    - Open, documented interfaces
> >    - Open, documented file formats
> >    - Compatibility with other solutions
> > - Collaboration
> >    - Meritocracy (there needs to be some hurdle for contributing and
> > based on ability*effort is best, if you care about the result)
>
> Free Software and open file format (ODF should be mentioned here) are 
> main topics IMHO - the other describe details of the main goals.

I see both as aspects of the solution. Free Software as imperatively so,
but ODF could see replacement, at least in theory.


> > But what is an "office productivity solution" or an "office (software)
> > suite", actually? How do you define the scope here? How do you include
> > enough, but not too much?
>
> That mainly depends on our goals:
>
> If we want to broaden the focus of applications / features / files 
> (calender, music, video, flash etc), the focus shouldn't be too narrow.
>
> On the other hand this would lead to expectations and development effort 
> that might be better focused on improving the existing specialized 
> applications inside and outside of LibO - while integration via gateways 
> and interfaces definitively makes sense.

Trying to define the scope of an "office productivity solution" from
typical office tasks would lead the the inclusion of communication and
scheduling, among other things.

But limited resources have to be spend well. I doubt the project could
or should afford to write another Outlook/Evolution, for example. This
asks for cooperation/interoperability/integration.

I still wonder what would be common to a
- word processor
- spreadsheet
- presentation app
- drawing app
- database app
?

All but the database seem to be somewhat paper-oriented, at least in the
sense that there are pages (or slides). You deal with documents.


-- 
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/


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