Initial draft for Community Manifesto

about/AlfrescoCommunityManifesto.md

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+# The Alfresco Community Manifesto
+
+## Pledge for a Free Open Source Content Services Tool
+
+Alfresco currently offers a free and Open Source Enterprise-grade Content Services platform. It has an extensive set of features and enables Content Professionals to do their work with ease, solving the pressing problems for managing content.  Being a free open core platform allows a dispersed community to work, test and innovate at a faster more productive level, and is key to keep ahead of any other entrants in the content management space.
+
+Over the last decade we have seen this promise fulfilled in many ways. With current developments and acquisition there seems to be a risk involved.  This puts community involvement at risk.  The community currently brings a diverse number of organisations together, solving wildly different problems, providing support to the uninitiated users, and experts alike as well as fostering collaboration with both Community and Enterprise users.  The community provides Alfresco with positive feedback to potential new users, and wider communities in the content services arena.  The community helps test new features, and provides feedback across a wide spectrum of platforms and implementation techniques.  Alfresco was founded and grown using the community, so to lose this stakeholder, would result in Alfresco becoming just another closed source product.
+
+We have learnt that we should more explicitly set out our aspirations in order to keep a Free and Open Source Software for the Content Service Industry, this manifesto is an attempt to do that.
+
+## The Alfresco Community: That’s you
+
+The Alfresco community is not an abstract concept. It is everyone who
+    • Contributed code or content to Alfresco Community.
+    • Visited a website to ask for Alfresco Community support.
+    • Learned your trade as a content service developer,
+    • Is interested in Alfresco Community, without ever contributing.
+
+Therefore: You are welcome to be part of “we”
+    • We are committed to making Alfresco Community the best and easiest solution for Content Service Professionals, helping Alfresco continue to develop and innovate at the same time.
+    • We are committed to providing the best possible framework for Alfresco Community as an Open Source project. We believe that self-governance and ownership of resources are a basic and indispensable requirement to guarantee a healthy community that is able to grow and foster innovation.
+    • We love community collaboration and would never want to give it up.
+    • We look forward to a mutually beneficial collaboration with Alfresco's new guardian. We respect their history of closed source,  but expect to come to a joint understanding based on the principles described here.
+
+## Our principles
+
+## Open for everyone
+
+We welcome everyone to our community. We make it easy to understand and easy to get started with. Real-life meetings of all sorts and sizes are encouraged and supported for growing and maintaining our active community, since personal relationships are considered a valuable complement to online sharing of knowledge, code and ideas.
+
+## People over code
+
+The needs of the users and contributors are the reason why we create code. We strive to continuously gather (and react to) feedback from users with understandable fluid communication.
+
+## Mutual respect
+
+As a community, we value respectful communication among each other as well as to the outside - regardless of who you are and what you believe in, what your background is, what you like as a person or what your professional focus is. Growing a diverse community that is closely united for the purpose is a top priority.
+
+## Every contribution is valuable
+
+All contributions are important for the success of the project, since contributions by newcomers might lead to happy and dedicated core contributors.
+This includes mentions like "It doesn't work on my server" which too is a valuable contribution - the underlying message being e.g. “improve documentation”. Even failed contributions are essential, because of how much we can learn when we fail. Contribution from newcomers is especially valuable, because they see the project with fresh eyes.
+
+## Transparency
+
+Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust. This includes open channels of communication as well as clear rules for decision making.
+
+## Responsibility and Accountability
+
+All areas of community activities need volunteers to take care of it (maybe you?), including someone to coordinate and also to be responsible. In order to give this a democratic and sustainable framework, it is very desirable to have an independent foundation/user-group that takes accountability and is able to redistribute responsibilities.
+
+## Commercial ecosystem
+
+A commercial ecosystem is essential to the success of this project. We encourage individuals, companies and agencies to sell services of all sorts based on Alfresco Community.  We expect Alfresco to develop their Enterprise, paid for offering, with the community benefiting from this, as well as Alfresco benefiting from the community’s input and effort for testing, and the exposing of new offerings. We would expect Alfresco to continue to be fully engaged with the community so together we can provide the best/leading content services platform the planet has ever seen.
+
+## Alfresco Enterprise Differentiation
+
+Alfresco needs to ensure a competitive advantage over other software providers in the space.  One of the ways they do this is to offer specific features appealing to certain business verticals.  As the community we, would value an ongoing dialogue around what features become paid for and what features become Open Source.  Features which benefit and support the common goal would be Open Source, while features serving tight verticals would become paid for services.
+
+## Summary
+
+With our principles detailed above, and an eagerness to ensure a solid open source future for Alfresco, we look forward to working constructively with Hyland, for the benefit of the product and the wider community going into the future.