[Older thread] Discussing mission statement draft

[LearningNerd]

Maybe try 3 variations to put to a vote during our next leadership meeting.

This would also benefit from researching the mission statements of other similar organizations.

[armaneous]

I am not a wordsmith, so maybe someone can figure out a way to summarize this into an elevator pitch, but I can describe my ideas of the problems I'd like us to solve:

Education, a very important backbone of a developed society, has not progressed well with technology. The amount of resources available for those wanting to enter the tech world are staggeringly large, but newcomers suffer from information overload and a fractured understanding of software. Additionally, many jobs are being replaced with automation and software development is one of the largest, if not the largest, growing industries. Learning to program is an important skill to bring an industrial-style educated workforce into the 21st century. Some may work directly in software, but many may not. Regardless, understanding how software works is an important skill and we should strive to provide the education for the desired level of understanding an individual may have.

One, very rough, mission statement might be something like:

Bringing people into the 21st century

[TheBeege]

Some ideas people mentioned in the doc during the meeting:

A: Provide a community for people to learn and expand software skills
B: Provide a way for people to learn to code
C: Bringing people into the 21st century through meaningful education and assistance
D: Teach people to navigate learning to code and work towards potential career paths or other goals

I'm a fan of A because it focuses on people developing relationships towards the end of building skills. It makes no assumptions about how the community is built nor how people learn software skills. I worry about "software skills" as it may be too broad or too narrow. It may be too broad in that you could argue using MS Word is a software skill. It may be too narrow in that it may not cover IoT stuff. I worry about saying "programming" due to things like infrastructure management and whatnot. Maybe IT and programming skills would be better?

B may be too broad, but I threw it up there. I'm not sure who posted C and D in the doc.