Nice starting drafts. Here's inspiration for a re-work. =)
What audience would read, understand (and retain) it?
Mission statements are like ethics code, administrative procedures or most any bureaucratic device written to affect behavior. Unless we are very careful, the act of discussing it may be more useful than the resultant document.
We need something practical, inclusive and directed... And the focus statement should be short. Think Monty Python's "seeking the Holly Grail", a mantra, battle cry etc.
Here is a suggestion distilled (and inspired) from the above drafts:
Mission Statement:
collaboratively develop scalable, re-usable, extendible database-driven applications
Then define what is meant by using these words. The description should be increasing in detail (and technical jargon).
A. collaboratively design, implement, and support the OpenACS system
B. build for scaling, re-using, and extending
What are the requirements of re-usable, extendible applications that scale?
1. ACID compliant database (link to doc about what this means, why it's important, what Openacs uses and why those DBs are chosen)
2. customizable (tcl code) (link to doc about this, why it's important..)
3. web server that's well connected to the database (aolserver) (link to what this means...)
4 ...
cheers,
Torben