What is a vision?

A vision for a project is like a constitution for a state, it should give a common sense of values by which all members of the community abide, it should be broad and generic enough that it doesn't need to be changed often, but it should also be precise enough that rules and decisions can be checked against it.

Project vision: contribution driven development

The main goal of the project from its very beginning is creating a contribution friendly climate. If somebody like you and me is crazy enough to spend time and efforts for the project doing coding, documenting, testing or supporting the community, it should be welcome. The people should have a feeling of being wanted and welcome.

As a project member anyone has the freedom to develop his own ideas and document them, to implement them or have a chance to inspire and convince the community and the coders to implement the ideas. Also if somebody wants to contribute in a way not foreseen in a concept, the contribution is allowed to happen and that the concept should reflect new ideas.

Product vision: be the Eclipse of the mind mapping world

We strive to develop FreePlane as a lean framework for mind mapping, with clear and well-documented interfaces, allowing for easy extension and customization by programmers, scripters and other non-developers, federating them in a lively community supporting our project vision. We furthermore strive to make FreePlane the reference implementation of a yet-to-be-developed open and extensible mind mapping file format aligned with the Open Document Format.