Habari mission statement suggestion.

[Les Henderson]

First let me say that this was developed based on your own suggestions over the years along with some current ones from people you know and respect.

I've juggled it around for hours, but am still hoping for your views in the hopes it can be polished further and officially established as the current mission statement, unless something better is presented.

The mission of the community-driven Habari Project is to continually improve upon a lean, modular, highly customizable, ASL licensed open-source PHP blogging engine featuring multilingual, multi-site and multi-author permissions support using well-documented development protocols and the latest technologies to satisfy the evolving needs of professional CMS developers.

[Petr Stuchlík]

Nice one.

Petr

Dne 5.4.2013 22:36, Les Henderson napsal(a):

First let me say that this was developed based on your own suggestions over the years along with some current ones from people you know and respect.

I've juggled it around for hours, but am still hoping for your views in the hopes it can be polished further and officially established as the current mission statement, unless something better is presented.

The mission of the community-driven Habari Project is to continually improve upon a lean, modular, highly customizable, ASL licensed open-source PHP blogging engine featuring multilingual, multi-site and multi-author permissions support using well-documented development protocols and the latest technologies to satisfy the evolving needs of professional CMS developers.

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[mratc...@mozilla.com]

As take-up accelerates this kind of thing will become very important in order to keep the spirit of Habari alive ... I like it.

[Chris Meller]

I'm not sure what the purpose of this was, really, but for a mission statement it's very wordy. It's a single long sentence that tries to cram a lot of unrelated and technical things together.

Perhaps "mission statement" was a misnomer. A mission statement should be short and to the point (I'd say half this length, at most). If it wouldn't be readable on a single PowerPoint slide from the back of the room, it's probably trying to cover too much. It should cover the spiritual goals of the project, not necessarily the technical ones. Technical requirements change and fade in and out of importance; the community-driven nature is the key point.

But like I said, I'm not sure what the purpose of this was. I'm also not big on mission statements in general, they tend to come off pointless and corny to me, so that's just my 2 cents worth.

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[Les Henderson]

I agree with you about mission statements in general. Corporate fluff for the most part. Read once when hired and then only seen in annual reports. Perhaps try to think of it more as a philosophy, an elevator pitch or a marketing blurb, all of which, including a mission statement, are things that you've been trying to come up with year after year without consensus or progress.

It was actually your suggestions in this post, https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/habari-dev/rzyMnWyItYA/RA3Ql9cjSEMJ along with input from others, that motivated me to give it a go.

Just as programming code is never perfect, the same holds true for marketing code. What I see this as, more than anything, is a way for people to find the project, quickly assess whether it is something they are looking for (in under a minute) and perhaps even motivate them to contribute or give it a try. An SEO bumper sticker if you will.

People don't search for spiritual goals in Google. They are looking for an "ASL open source blog project", "lean CMS dev kit for multisite blogging" "multilingual multiple author blog platform". Or, at least if they were, they would not currently find Habari.

The real question is, if you saw this as the blurb for some other competing product that you had never heard of, would you be intrigued enough to investigate further.

[Chris Meller]

On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 12:15 PM, Les Henderson <les.hend...@gmail.com> wrote:

I agree with you about mission statements in general. Corporate fluff for the most part. Read once when hired and then only seen in annual reports. Perhaps try to think of it more as a philosophy, an elevator pitch or a marketing blurb, all of which, including a mission statement, are things that you've been trying to come up with year after year without consensus or progress.

 <snip>

People don't search for spiritual goals in Google. They are looking for an "ASL open source blog project", "lean CMS dev kit for multisite blogging" "multilingual multiple author blog platform". Or, at least if they were, they would not currently find Habari.

The real question is, if you saw this as the blurb for some other competing product that you had never heard of, would you be intrigued enough to investigate further.

I like the phrase "elevator pitch", actually. It's something that would describe it in a concise way for any site that wants a description of Habari. It would be good to have a standard version that we could use various places. Even random sites like Transifex want you to describe your project, and I know it's a pain every time I end up having to make something up on the fly.

If you search for "Habari" on Google, one of the top results is the old Google Code repo... another place where a concise description would have been beneficial, instead of going on about what "Habari" means.

In a totally unrelated matter, I wonder if we could get rid of that site entirely...

[Les Henderson]

Thanks go to Michael C. Harris who noted this now accomplished wishlist in that 2008 post.

"I'd like to be able to use Habari as a lightweight CMS for clients. The most important features missing for that are page hierarchies and a permissions system. Multisite and multi-author support would be great too."

Sure, the technical features will change over time but so can the blurb. Build the bike shed right away, but just plan to paint it every few years.

[Owen Winkler]

On 4/6/2013 12:43 PM, Chris Meller wrote:
>
> In a totally unrelated matter, I wonder if we could get rid of that site
> entirely...

I scheduled it for deletion.

Owen

[Owen Winkler]

On 4/5/2013 9:51 PM, Chris Meller wrote:
>
> But like I said, I'm not sure what the purpose of this was. I'm also not
> big on mission statements in general, they tend to come off pointless
> and corny to me, so that's just my 2 cents worth.

We already have some language of this kind, published on the live site:
http://habariproject.org/en/vision

Owen

[Les Henderson]

Yes, that's great. Not quite condensed enough for a bumper sticker either, but a good job matching SEO with your ideals.

I'll examine it for the terms you deem favorable to your vision and see if they can be utilized in a condensed description for when that need arises.

[Les Henderson]

This is just an edited condensation of the vision page, should brevity ever be required elsewhere at some point, such as a press release.


Habari is a vibrant and competitive blogging tool with a robust, "lean and mean" framework that can expand, if desired, into a far more complex content management system through an easily accessible collection of modular enhancements.

Seeking to foster a community of leaders who appreciate the long-term value of Free Software, Habari was designed to be a solid foundation for building new web developer and design skills using the PHP object oriented programming language, CSS and HTML.

Since a foundational principle of the Habari Project is the belief that "Community is greater than Code", well-commented documentation and beautiful theme designs are valued just as much as elegant, readable patches and open source code contributions.