The Habari Community is an interesting blend of people, and the fact that I was honored with membership in the Project Management Committee means that, in the eyes of the the other PMC members, I bring something important to that community. I feel that it would be useful for me to articulate what I see as my personal philosophy for what I bring to the Habari community, and why. I'm not much of a coder, and my visual design skills are no where near the level of many of the other community members, but what I think I do well is articulate what "typical" users look for, and help look at the long term results of decisions we make.
I feel that the overall goal of Habari is to become the best blogging platform available. This means that Habari needs to meet the needs and expectations of users. It also needs to be a stable project that has a responsive development community, and long-term support. In order to achieve these goals, we must build a system for supporting and encouraging growth, while maintaining high standards within the development and support of the application. I feel that, at this stage in Habari's development we're not just building an application, we're building Habari as a whole. The software, the documentation, the community, the process, and the ethics are all a part of what makes Habari what it is. We need to develop all of these in order to see Habari be what it truly can be. The software is the base on which it's built, but the rest are what bring people to the code and keep them involved. While the development of Habari is driven by the people who write the code, the growth of the community is dependent on the users. We must always keep the users forefront in our minds when making decisions about the directions we go with Habari; not only the users we have now, but those we will have in the future. If we are to write the best blogging platform, we need to be sure that the code isn't the only aspect we're developing with each release.
