Mission: this is the Why we exist, who we please: to be the best Perl-based Wiki (I agree that TWikiMission addresses the need of a Mission statement)

Vision: where are we now, where are we going to go? Includes a realistic evaluation of the product as-is, architectural issues, competitors products and any gap analyses needed.

By contrast, (at least to date) the release documents state only the improvements being made. They are simply a feature list but without overall guiding direction. They say nothing about developing wholistic approaches to advocacy, for example.

For a quick summary of the distinction between mission, vision and values documents, please see:

• http://www.mapnp.org/library/plan_dec/str_plan/stmnts.htm#anchor521412, contrast of vision and strategic planning, see
• http://www.prosci.com/vis1.htm

For a more extensive exploration into Strategic Planning, see

• http://www.mapnp.org/library/plan_dec/str_plan/str_plan.htm

So, in summary, yes, I think these documents are required but we need to agree on the contents.

-- MartinCleaver - 15 Sep 2002

Previous versions of this document had my priorities for TWiki. These are now on PersonalRoadmapForMartinCleaver

-- MartinCleaver - 26 Nov 2005

I understand wanting to have more influence in the future development of TWiki - most of the ideas which are important to me in UsabilityIdeas seem to have fallen on deaf ears, or at least unresponsive fingers. ; -) An attempt to impose a high level vision and architecture on an essentially chaotic structure using only words is a difficult task at the best of times. The proverbial herding cats image is appropriate here. TWiki is an open source product developed by many different individuals with as many differing interests and goals. As such the only effective method of influencing the general direction of flow is to contribute code of sufficient interest and utility that it gets used and modified by the other contributors.

Words alone can also influence flow, but they must be of the persuasive and "fire in the mind" variety, which in my experience is very difficult indeed to all but a few writers.

-- MattWilkie - 17 Sep 2002

Thank you for taking the time to respond Matt. As time passes I have become more and more aware that TWiki is constrained by the man-power devoted to it. It does not have the lively development in the core that many other projects have, people seldom contribute to the core and recently, when they have tried to, there has been little enthusiasm in incorporating the changes and no support in showing people what they need to do. (Granted, this is not the case with the Plugins, but even innovations made there are slow being brought into the core.)

-- MartinCleaver - 18 Sep 2002

Much new has made it into the core in the last year whilst keeping TWiki stable. Good code such as MegaTWiki had been submitted, but there's an enormous amount of work to incorporate such changes into the core and people have to volunteer for this work.

The statement “I answered by showing that most organisations find it useful to make the distinction” is by no means proved for conventional companies. For an OpenSource project its validity is even more questionable.

-- JohnTalintyre - 18 Sep 2002

Martin - I think part of the problem here is terminology. A Vision statement is something that never changes, and does not get specific about features and technologies, rather it is a very high level aim against which you compare the specific things you are working on. So it makes no sense to talk about a vision for a specific release. -- MartinWatt - 18 Sep 2002

I guess I should have called this document TWikiRoadMap...

-- MartinCleaver - 04 Jun 2003

ImplementIdeaBeforeTheCompetition strikes me as a Vision-type aspiration.

I know that the community does not seem to appreciate a distinction between Mission and Vision: I'm not about to argue it.

-- MartinCleaver - 02 Nov 2004

In light of the PersonalRoadmap initiative, I've cut my opinion into my PersonalRoadmapForMartinCleaver and (because there is enough junk on Codev) deleted the now irrelevant heated discussions to retain a good summary quality to this topic. If TWiki had separate tabs for each topic I'd have moved the irrelevant stuff to a different tab. In leui of this you can find what I eliminated by visiting (http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/rdiff/Codev/TWikiVision?rev1=1.17&rev2=1.16).

-- MartinCleaver - 26 Nov 2005