Here are some extract of the progress on this:
What are the differences between Mission, Vision and Methology?
- The vision is the world we are longing for, beyond technology, think impact on humanity.
- The mission is what Waku does to move us towards the vision. There may be many ways to achieve this vision, and the mission is the specific manner Waku goes about it.
- Methodology is how Waku execute the mission, concrete initiatives that applies the Logos governing principles (more abstract) as well as good practices. Methodology described actionable items to drive day-to-day micro-decision from contributors, it set the practical side of the culture.
Vision
Vision should talk to anyone, and need for privacy and censorship-resistance should be mean to see this vision, aka, not needed to be explicitely stated.
Also, Waku is part of the Logos technology stack, so there it would make sense for the vision to be the one described in the Logos Manifesto
Note: LLM was used here to extract a vision from the Logos Manifesto, and I am doing a manual review of the proposed statements.
We dream of a digital future where human agency flourishes beyond the reach of surveillance and coercion. In this world, individuals and communities exist as true digital citizens—not subjects of corporate platforms or state monitoring systems, but sovereign beings who choose their own paths in cyberspace.
We can also slightly reword the vision to focus it on Waku’s specific domain of communications (aka interactions), and shorten it for brevity:
A digital future where human agency flourishes beyond the reach of surveillance and coercion.
A world where users can interact digitally freely and securely without the fear of surveillance or coercion
Mission
Logos’ mission also applies here in terms of how Waku goes above pushing the world towards this vision, as Logos is a technology stack, and Waku one component in the stack.
So here, we can now draft a statement that describes what Waku is doing, and simplify as well to ensure it’s easy to understand and reachable, we want people to rally to it and contribute, use and advocate:
Create self-sustaining communication protocols, software, and networks for building private, censorship-resistant applications that run on everyday devices.
keywords such as open, secure, reliable, scalable are inferred because building such technology being that, would not lead to the vision.
Yet, this mission statement is also about communicating clearly what we do, so it may be worth adding them at the price of lengthening the statement:
Create open, reliable, scalable, and self-sustaining communication protocols, software, and networks for building private, censorship-resistant applications that run on everyday devices.
This statement describes how Waku participate to the overall Logos vision:
- we enable human agency via communication, enabling coordination and interaction.
- and we ensure it is secure, prone to surveillance and coercion by making it private, censorship resistant but also self-sustaining.
Methodology
The aim here is to synthetise every day practice, and help reinforce the working/engineering culture in Waku. As a reminder for contributors, as well as an open contract to the audience and users.
We are building FOSS software and public goods, and hence the methodology should be derived from best practices in software and FOSS domain, our commitment to building public goods in public, with some specifics applied (e.g. we design protocols and use Nim):
- Release early, release often, and dogfood.
- Start with narrow scopes, and increment on them.
- Deliver protocol specification and implementation together.
- Discuss, design, and code in public.
- Single-purpose components to have re-usable code.
- Languages of choice are TypeScript for the Browser, Nim for the rest.
- Working examples over Documentation.
Feedback and opinions are still welcome. We will present a refined version of the reasoning above and a recommendation next week. The call will be streamed. Details in Waku Discord (or just follow our socials) https://discord.waku.org/