BartVB
Thank you for your very valuable comments. I'm currently working with @jordanjay29 and @luceos on this one, and so the feedback from our tremendous community is very much appreciated!
We've made a large number of changes, but I wish to directly address some of your points:
Nitpicks
We empower people and companies to connect intellectually and emotionally through online communities, by providing a technically excellent, open and extensible discussion platform.
Is Flarum a discussion platform? IMO discussions are only one form of 'threads' or 'topics'. A community can also be based around answers, blogs, photo's, etc.
And does Flarum enable companies to connect or does it empower people (who work at companies)?
This is actually a very good point, and one that does raise a valuable question. We absolutely do cater to blogs, photos etc, but at the core we set out to change the future of discussion forums. This is why we worded the document as the above, as we were focusing on the core of Flarum, rather than the extensibility.
Goals:
They should be more specific. For example what does 'A design which is superior' mean? Superior to whom? In what regard?
We are already working on extending the specif wording of the goals, as this was originally intended as a starting point for the team, so that we can continue to develop on the document. We have now decided to split out short-term goals to our sprint releases, and long term goals towards our vision.
Team structure:
I miss someone responsible for the foundation and the general direction (/strategy) of the project? Or is that a part of 'operations'?
This someone would be @luceos, who heads up our official Flarum Foundation. He would be responsible for pushing forth our general strategy, and for spear-heading the future of the project. This will be better defined in the document by linking to our new team page.
Regarding mentioning the team members; I was also wondering why a part of the team is mentioned in the strategy document? Who fulfills what role is something for implementation, not strategy.
Because the team is mentioned throughout the document, and so it's nice to have a reference point as we refer (in the document) to people by their display name or their real names.
Main points
The most important thing that I didn't see in the current revision of the document is a set of boundaries. It should be possible to take a random idea ('frontend in Vue', 'enterprise hosting', 'Facebook integration') and test if this matches the long term goals of Flarum. One thing that can help tremendously is specifying a (very limited) set of core values. Also possible to explicitly mention some does and don'ts for the project (i.e. regarding money, partnerships, privacy, technology, etc).
I'd be interested to see some examples that yourself or @Sanguine might have with regards to this one, as I say - we are really appreciating the feedback, and feel that you two may have some great ideas with regards to strategic boundaries that we could define.
Good points by Sanguine 👍️
Competition is a bit of a strange thing for an open source project. It's not a primary focus point, but adoption is important for sustaining the ecosystem. Curious how Flarum relates to, for instance, Discourse, Reddit, Telegram/Instagram/Whatsapp and Facebook Groups.
Good points by the both of you! 😉
Competition is something that we are defining ourselves. We would like to be competitive in the market as we aim to push Flarum out. We are an ambitious team and would like to pit ourselves against the likes of vBulletin. We're aiming to change the perception of forums, and to do that keeping up with "competitors" such as Invision Community would be great for this.
Social platforms such as Telegram, Whatsapp and Facebook (to name a few) are great examples and should be included in the strategy, so we will try to add this.
One last, maybe the most difficult, point; I think it's smart to think about how to work with all involved volunteers. They have responsibilities but how do you hold them to that? How do you keep volunteers motivated? How do you keep them involved and engaged?
This is a difficult one from my stand-point. Volunteers are exactly that. We need to be careful how we word "holding them to responsibilities" though I do take your point. Keeping them motivated and engaged (to me) is a separate issue, and we can define this separately in our organisational documentation.
I thank both you and @Sanguine for your comments thus far, and implore you to continue with your input as a lot of these have been implemented as a result. Please note that this document is evolving regularly with input from myself and @jordanjay29 and is subject to change as we continue to evolve our ideas and thought process for this.
Kind regards,
Katos.
