Skip to main content

Core Values

Buddies of Budgie has several established "core values" that act as our guiding principles for leading our organization, community, and our projects (technical or otherwise).

Independence​

Independence is a crucial value to how we operate as an organization. All organizations and projects are equal stakeholders in the future of the organization and most importantly, the future of the Budgie Desktop platform. No singular for-profit or non-profit entity has sole influence over our direction. This value was defined based on the history of the project (Budgie Desktop), experiences of those actively contributing to its development / evolution, and technical perspective on how we wish Budgie to evolve going forward.

  • Budgie is viewed as a platform and encourages consumers of Budgie, such as any operating system which ships it as the option (or one of many) to make decisions which allow them to ship Budgie and their desired ecosystem in a manner that best satisfies their user base. This does not need to be "stock" Budgie, so long as an operating system or user is using Budgie, we are happy!
  • We have made technical decisions for Budgie 11 and beyond that focuses on a clear separation between the "data layer" that enables complex Budgie functionality, and the visual / "presentation layer". This reduces our reliance on any one given upstream for a toolkit or related libraries, allowing us to potentially explore different models for achieving the presentation layer, and even enabling other developers to build on top of Budgie's data layer with their own presentations.

Transparency​

Transparency has been central to how we function from the start. Transparency is not just a value but a way of working. We would prefer to have an excess of transparency than folks lacking sufficient understanding of the day-to-day functions of Budgie and its respective organization, as more information available to everyone enables smarter decision-making and easier retrospectives.

In practice, this means striving to perform the below:

  • Proactive communication on the plans for the organization and any of its projects, through social media, our own web properties, and more. This includes active engagement with the broader open source community.
  • Fostering public and open discussions through our freely joinable Matrix Space as well as discussion forums on GitHub.

User-centric​

Buddies of Budgie and the Budgie desktop itself is built for its users. Users are seen as stakeholders in development and day-to-day operations, with a fundamental part of our consensus model for making changes to the organization and our platform being how do our decisions positively impact the end user’s experience.

People should feel encouraged to get involved directly, promoting fairness in our ways of working, and helping to reduce the likelihood that changes are performed in a vacuum where there is no clear understanding on the user's position to a specific change. If we are unsure of the impact, our consensus model mandates that surveying / polling in some form is done so we can gather user sentiment / thoughts.