The CAT Mission Statement

November 28th, 2008 by Ahmed S. Farghal Leave a reply »

This post is about a document that became part of history, but for me part of the unforgettable history because it was a state-of-the-art and I believe that it encircles all the problems (or most of) that CAT are facing from the early days of CAT until now. It was the document behind the “Foundation System” and it was written in almost 5 hours with no single go-back-for-check. So you might find alot of spelling and grammatical mistakes so be tolerate :)

This document was written (February, 2006) after a very inactive era of CAT and we were losing alot of members and activities were going down and down, then I decided to write a Mission Statement for CAT that include my analysis to the problems and my suggested solutions which part of them were implemented and part were not.

Background

I kept thinking two days about that and what I remember is that I was with psycho or abdalla (not sure) in Prima Burger (in the university) and the idea of foundation system poped in my head and I tried to explain it to him then he said to me, it’s better if you thought well about it and write it down so I can understand :)

I said, OK, and I wrote that and ideas kept flowing and flowing, then I printed that document and got more than one copy with me to a trip we were having to cairo (Smart Village Trip, that was arranged by the sciences club) and people got shocked with it and we had a very very interesting meeting in a microbus while we were heading from the ring road to down town (Tahrir), as I remember it was me, psycho, bingo, biko in the microbus and they liked the idea (I remember that binGo didn’t like the idea of the foundation system for long time, and not sure whether his opinion changed or not).

Then after sometime we decided that I should share in coordinating CAT with abdalla as I was excited about implementing those ideas. Things went very wrong in the beginning but suddenly I decided that it was worthless trying to implement my ideas that way, so I left the coordination after almost 6 months and I posted a blog post called “I’m Sorry CAT” then I worked on the solution from the other way around, I started my own foundation to fire things up in CAT and I was very successful in that at then.

I was successful because I shared my dreams with a bunch of guys who were not poisoned by the problems of CAT at then, they were not CAT even but they were too excited to do something for their country (at then :) ) my main turn-key man was Ayman Taher. I depended on him very much and he consistently proved that he is reliable and talented, also there were alot of other whom I cannot forget their efforts, like Abdel-Rahman Hegazy, Mostafa Shehata, Kareem Samy, Ihab Khattab, Hossam Barakat, Mo’ataz Al Hawary, Ahmed El Gamil,  Medo Ghala, Hatim ElSum, Alaa’ Albosaty, Maher Saif and Kabodah (Abdo Al Kattan). Almost Everyone in this photo.

H4ck3rZ Team

H4ck3rZ Team

That team was named H4ck3rZ (pronounced Hackers) and I’m very very proud to be the team founder.

This is the original document in PDF format, completely unmodified, please read and see what problems were solved and witness the progress of CAT which I’m really proud of, cat-mission-statement

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4 comments

  1. kamasheto says:

    Well, I can imagine why none of the goals you had set your mind to came true — the documentation is VERY long! Did anybody read it to the end? Heh, too bad, I really REALLY agree with the goals. CAT’s activities should have been more in the form of sessions rather than just meetings — perhaps it’s because of the strict (negative) connotation associated with the word “meetings” people are less likely to learn, listen, and produce.

    Having read (and not just feel, and listen to) your ideas and visions (well, and how well you structure your goals) I can now tell why hackers excelled, and why you deserved being the the most effective and creative founder in CAT.

  2. Gamal says:

    ———————————————————-
    4-Arguing
    It seems that we are very professional in arguing, so we don’t have to learn this :) , we have a very
    scary disease called “AIDS” –Arguing Is Destroying Success”. negative arguing is common
    between Egyptians so it’s very natural to see it between a small sample of the nation. but the
    problem that we can’t live with such a disease, AIDS is leading to death as you know so our talents
    and creativity will die if we resumed our very pointless arguing, if you don’t want something say
    that you don’t agree about it once and describe your point of view in one statement, and if the rest
    if agrees to your point of view then you win, if not then you are a winner too because you are part
    of the team who took the right decision. the goal is to take the right decision not to take your
    decision. if their decision was found later to be not so right then help finding a solution instead of
    reminding them that you said the right decision and they didn’t hear you. it’s better to save the day
    instead of shouting.
    —————————————–

    That part was tailored for me :) )
    bas ana 5afet mn el AIDS el wa2te .. bythay2le 8-)

    Thank you :)

  3. @Kamasheto :Thanks :)

    @Gamal: Yes :) but not only you, it was related to many guys, but yeah you are cured :) and almost everybody else…

  4. bingorabbit says:

    I didn’t attend that Tahrir meeting, lel asaf, I wasn’t able to make it that day.

    @kamasheto: I read it to the end, almost all of the CAT Founders read it, but I didn’t accept some points in it as Ahmed mentioned, one of them was the foundation system.
    .. I agree that the “Sessions” idea is really great, sessions which should teach us how to lead and manage us. More sessions in Soft Skills, like the Map your Mind one I did, which actually teach you your capabilities rather than a technical approach like the mind mapping itself. I believe in such sessions, it really have proven success between all CAT members because they really do like it. Technical approaches are every where, but knowing how to learn is what we need, how to manage and lead, how to organize our thoughts, these kind of sessions is what we actually need in my opinion.

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