[Devel] A vision statement for the main website

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hey, all. I'm sending this email because people get confused about what 
the site is about, and I have an idea to help us keep focused, while also 
helping other people understand OpenHatch.

People get confused
-------------------

There was just a long conversation on #openhatch about... what the site is 
about exactly.

This sort of thing happens all the time with the site -- a few months ago, 
we brought people through the site on a virtual tour so they could figure 
it out. That was in October: 
https://openhatch.org/blog/2010/learn-more-sunday-monday-office-hours/

It went well! You can read the logs at 
http://irclogs.jackgrigg.com/irc.freenode.net/openhatch/2010-10-11#i_2448722

But people still get confused.

Vision statements
-----------------

I read Ruben Vermeersch's post a few months ago that talked about writing 
a vision statement. At 
http://weblog.savanne.be/199-a-tale-about-design-part-two he explained how 
helpful it was to the new F-Spot (a photo manager) team to have a vision. 
Here's what they came up with:

<snippet>

     F-Spot is a cross platform application for organizing thousands of 
photos. It shuns ‘organizing in folders.’ instead, metadata is the basis 
for viewing and drilling down the collection. Adding and maintaining 
metadata is easy and enjoyable in F-Spot.

     Individual photos can be retouched and globally corrected (e.g. 
dynamic range, color), for sharing via the net, printing and viewing by 
consumers. The number and sophistication of the correction scales to the 
the ambition of users. An advanced form of corrections is that of batches 
of photos.

     Beginners in the digital photo field can easily start using F-Spot. 
These and more advanced users are encouraged by F-Spot to grow their 
skills, to the point where they integrate more specialized photo 
manipulation software into their F-Spot workflow.

</snippet>

We wrote one for the training missions. It's on the web at 
https://openhatch.org/blog/2010/the-thinking-behind-the-training-missions/. 
It's already been very helpful; we used it as part of justifying some 
changes to the Subversion mission <http://openhatch.org/bugs/issue171>.

Call to action
--------------

Can you come up with a Vision Statement for the OpenHatch site as a whole?

I'm going on vacation for the next week, and I'll spend it mostly far away 
from any of my computers.

So -- I'd be interested to hear what you all have *inferred* we are up to. 
(-: Maybe you can explain this thing concisely already.

Feel free to reply to this post!

If you're interested, please try your hand at writing a vision statement 
for OpenHatch! I'm going to be on vacation this week, mostly far away from 
computers, so I won't have a chance to.

...actually, I might give it a try right now. I'll work on a reply. But 
that'll really just be one idea.

-- Asheesh.

P.S. Part of the reason this is confusing is