OpenCore Software

Nick brought up some very good questions in his “Year in Review” post—none of which I intend to answer here.

Instead, I want to address a larger question he implicitly poses: how do we define success? At the moment we simply ignore the question altogether and are content to ride the wave of our day-to-day inertia, but it is a question that is crucial to our existence as an organization. No doubt we each have our own conception of what would make us successful: for some it is the quality of our software at the code level, for others the value it brings to our users, and for others still a sense of how ‘cool’ it makes them feel. Yet, without a shared vision of how we define success and the path to get there we will continue to be pull each other in different, often incompatible, directions.

Conventional measures of success like market share and profitability, however convenient and problematic they may be, simply don’t apply to a non-profit like ours. This puts us in the difficult position of having to define our own success. As Cholmes is so fond of saying, we’re not a non-profit but a ‘for-benefit’, so do we define success as the amount of ‘benefit’ we produce? How would you go about defining our success?

Coming up:

• Towards a Definition of Success
• Defining Failure