Planning roadmap design and link

Today in an extended work session with @board and some of the team sitting in, we discussed how to overhaul Snowdrift Wiki - Snowdrift.coop Roadmap to make it a much more usable roadmap.

I already did an initial draft-level update to the page which previously was just a disorganized single-level bullet list. But the key items from the meeting were:

  • Organize by phases (ideally by time-frame such as quarters)
  • Within each phase, organize the proposed work by a reliable set of categories
  • The roadmap should state the broad concepts but more concretely than vague terms like “solidify”
  • It should link to actionable milestones and issues in GitLab but does not need to map to those exactly
  • We should specifically mark which items are launch-critical
  • The roadmap should be written for use by many parties: the team organizing our work, the Board and outside advisors like OSI reviewing and holding us accountable, and the broader community seeing our progress or volunteering to help

Everyone appreciated the simple clarity of the status-page mockups. We just have one request for that page: it should link directly to the planning roadmap. How should that be added?

We have an explicit request for design input on how to format the roadmap most effectively. Once that’s settled, we can get to working out the content.

3 Appreciations

Probably something more visual, than a bunch of bullet points, is best: perhaps a themed flowchart?

As a potential guiding star, check out the roadmap for this FLO project that’s also been working on a release for many years now:

https://safenetwork.tech/roadmap/

(Scroll towards the bottom)

1 Appreciation

Seems to be using milestones in the roadmap. @eloquence was emphasizing that roadmap is really higher-level and should not map to the milestone details necessarily. We should also be using milestones well and make it easy to track them.

1 Appreciation

@msiep check-in today made things clear enough. Our format for now will be:

  • current phase (with date)
  • backlog (roughly ordered and marked)
  • each section (phase and backlog) having items grouped by overall category
  • separate wiki page to record past phases for accountability

The one item still would like from you: please decide on the best place to link directly to the roadmap from the (to-be-implemented) status page of the main site. I.e. we want that page to have a direct link to the roadmap wiki page.

1 Appreciation

I’d suggest a link “See our roadmap” centered at the bottom of the yellow “Status” box on the /about page.

3 Appreciations

Snowdrift Wiki - Snowdrift.coop Roadmap has been updated. Room for tweaking but much improved, functional enough. Feedback welcome from anyone.

I updated the GitLab issue.

“roadmap” vs “planning”?

Any thoughts on the naming? The URL is /planning and “roadmap” is mentioned in places. Should we make this clearer or doesn’t matter?

If it is called roadmap in the link the destination headline should reflect that to make it clear.

1 Appreciation

While still at /planning, I made the title “Snowdrift.coop Launch Roadmap”

We also have the finished work more formally announced at this topic: Roadmap update

1 Appreciation