Define The Venture

[Pertempto]

We have an organization! Yay! Now what?

Some basic questions that I think should be answered.

• What are our goals?
• What values will drive our development?
• ~What are some things we might be interested in developing?~ - MOVED TO #3

[Pertempto]

Haha I probably should have split this into 3 different issues.

I'll go ahead and split the third question into a new issue, I think the first two kind of go together.

[Pertempto]

Some basic answers I have (not polished)

What are our goals?

These are some of the goals that sound neat to me.

• Create apps that
  • we will personally use on a regular basis
    • Otherwise, we won't be very motivated to work on them
    • Even if no one else ever uses these apps, we'll have gotten value out of them by using them in our families
  • could be useful for others
    • I love the idea of being able to use my skills in coding to create apps which I could then gift to others
  • are totally and always open source
    • Ideally we could host them in a way that is free for personal use - but we will need some way to cover the hosting costs
    • We also don't want to limit ourselves from monetizing them as business apps
  • have excellent data import/export features and integrations with other services
    • We do not want to support vendor lock-in
    • We do want to give our users as much control over their data as possible
• Have a place to work together on code in a non-stressful environment
  • no deadlines
  • no pressure
  • work on it when we each have time and desire

Values

These are some values that are very important to me personally, but we wouldn't have to include all of them for our team.

• users own their data
  • It should be easy for users to take their data out of our apps at any time they please
  • We should aim to use pre-existing standards, protocols, and file formats anywhere we can.
• giving, not taking
  • Our apps should be focused on automating tedious things so that people can focus on more interesting things
  • Our apps should not aim to consume our user's time or money
• decentralized
  • Not everything can be easily de-centralized. But in general, if there is an choice between a de-centralized implementation for something and a centralized implementation for something, and all other factors are pretty equal (complexity, time required to implement, quality of user experience, etc.) - we should choose the de-centralized option
• transparency
  • If our code is going to be free and open source, why not aim to also keep most of the design work public and transparent? Put it on GitHub instead of in private communication channels.