# Current Situation
This is how KDE is perceived and its place in the IT market. This information is gleaned from a lot of anecdotal data, so please take wirh a grain of salt.
## Technology
Despite being quite mature in many aspects, KDE's frameworks and libraries do not seem to be used or, indeed, known much outside of the KDE community. We have had several (admittedly anecdotal) experiences in which organisations and companies that we thought would've known better, were completely ignorant of what KDE had to offer.
* **The Plasma Desktop** has a low penetration. Very high ratio of developers to users.
* Many **applications** are quite well known (Krita, Kdenlive), but users do not associate them with KDE (see **Brand** later). Otherwise, while excellent dwell in total obscurity.
* **Frameworks** are surprisingly underused outside the KDE community. Even many FLOSS projects are ignorant of what we do.
## Community
According to many accounts, the community is not what it used to be. This is true about activism in the FLOSS world in general: people grow older, find time-absorbing jobs, have families and have less time to give away. Also FLOSS is not perceived as an exciting, pioneering, revolutionary thing like it use to be, so a younger generation is not that interested.
* **The KDE community is shrinking**. According to testimonies of old-timers and numbers of attendees at events, there is decline of active community members from a peak that was reached in 2013.
* **The community is largely homogenous** with regard to gender, race, class and geographical extraction, being made up mainly by white male middle class European engineers
* There is a **large ratio of developers to users**. This comes about in part from the philosophy of "scratch your own itch" which is pervasive in FLOSS development: Developers are often the consumers of their own development. In KDE, however, this is a bit more diluted and can attributed to the fact that KDE technologies are not that well-known outside our community.
## Brand
* **The KDE brand is recognised withn the FLOSS community**, even though many of the products are not. That said, KDE is still being used as a synonym of "Plasma desktop" by most FLOSS community members not associated with KDE.
* Anecdotal (but not unique) evidence collected at external conferences seems to indicate that **the KDE brand is not known outside the FLOSS community**.
* **Some popular apps are not associated with our brand**, despite being fostered within our community.
## Others
* **Domestic usage is probably lower than 1%**: if we take the figures that say that users of the Linux desktop make up little more than 2% of the market, and taking into account that by most measures, Gnome is the most pervasive of the Linux desktops, it stands to reason that KDE's Plasma desktop is used by less than 1% of the desktop users worldwide.
* **Professional usages is probably also ver low**:"Professional" as in use in offices, hospitals, schools, public administriations, etc. If we have learnt anything from things like Wannacry and other virus crisis is that the most public institutions and big companies use proprietary tools that are also outdated.
* **Progress in getting KDE tech on devices**: That said, we have made progress in getting KDE software (especially the Plasma) preinstalled onto devices. The KDE Slimbook I and II, the Pinebook (although not as a default) and our ongoing work to get Plasma Mobile onto the Librem 5 and other devices, are examples of the headway we are making.
# Long Term Goals
## For Technology
The main aim in this section is to increase project sustainability be adding more developers and acquiring better and more stable financing. One way of doing this would be to increase the usage of KDE frameworks and software in general in companies.
* **Increase adoption of frameworks in development companies**. In part, by increasing the userbase and the use of KDE software in non-techie organisations, we may increase the interest of third party companies to ramp up the use of our frameworks to develop their own software.
* **Increase *support* from companies and organisations** -- This has to do with "selling" our technology to other companies and having them adopt it for their own needs, in the hope that they will pour resource back into the community, in the shape of more developers, sponsorships and upstream improvements on exisiting software. One way to make this happen is (and we are currently implementing) is by attending external events. These are technologically-oriented and, thus, attended by developers from other projects and the companies that employ them. By attending these events with speakers and booths, we hope to attract attention from a larger audience in the IT sector.
## For KDE community
* **Increase diversity**: Take page from Wikimedia's playbook on how to encourage under-represented groups to participate in KDE's community. Implement and enforce strict CoC against discrimination and harrassment. Also, move main event (Akademy) away from Europe and encourage sprints and events in other places, like Asia, South America and Africa.
* **Increase number contributors**: To stop the community from shrinking further and, if possible, reverse that trend, we can again use the effort to pudh for diversity. While activism of FLOSS in the Europe and North America has decreased, in developing countries FLOSS is very much a nascent movement, akin to what it was like in Europe and the US in the early 2000s. This is a demographic KDE can cater to and, in the process, bring new blood with new perspectives into the community. This would be a mid-to-long term solution.
* **Acquire more sponsors**: Apart from working with companies as mentione in the *For Technology* section above, we can also jump start interest in sponsorin KDE projects by attending events which management from corporations also attend. We want to deliver talks to CTOs and have booths to showcase KDE's solutions. In part, this strategy is already being implemented.
## For brand
We want to increase brand awareness across the board.
* And **become household name**. This will probably require a "two story" approach. It is unlikely that KDE will become recognised on its software merits alone. This is where standard advertising, ad stunts, and things beyond the solely technological will have to come into play.
* We also want to **become recognised as a provider of quality software**. We would need to make sure QA is carried out on all projects associated with our brand and they abide by KDE's core vision.
* We will also want **reinforce KDE's brand through popular applications**. We will want to ask application project leaders to push the KDE brand front and centre to increase brand awareness in users.
## For Others
Increase number of end-users by
* **Taking over niches**, like in education, science & research, art, etc.
* **Gettig KDE software preinstalled on devices**, something that is already happening in a limited fashion. We want to establish ties with manufacturers and help them and support them to get Plasma, Plasma Mobile, and the rest of KDE's ecosystem working on their devices.
* **Increasing the presence of KDE software in companies** by looking for enterprise partners (SUSE, KDAB, Qt, etc.) that can help support companies that would like to adopt KDE software and need technical corporate backing.
* **Increasing the number of domestic users**, which maybe achieved by striking deals with hardware providers to supply them with OEM versions of KDE-based distributions.