This is an interesting, if difficult job. Above I stated that a mission was more like a goal. Then I read some of the links I provided. Seems there is some basic agreement in the non-profit area at least. A mission seems to be made up of three things:
- What is the purpose of the community/organization?
- How is the purpose to be achieved?
- What are the community/organization values?
The first is really the goal or goals. The second offers a roadmap to achieve the goals. The third sets some guidelines, possibly the reason for the goal, or parameters under which the goals must be achieved.
For instance one goal of the OpenACS community could be to produce a high quality web toolkit.
One way to achive the goal is to write and improve code and improve performance, modularize, refactor, set and enforce standards, etc.
The associated values are to offer advice and direction when asked, to encourage participation by users, to encourage collaboration among developers and users, and to encourage funded developers to consider giving back useful code.
An overall value might be to use the internet and the OpenACS toolkit as a positive force for solving diverse communication needs.
