The Open edX Team is excited to announce a new program to co-create a shared product roadmap for the Open edX learning platform.
The goals of the program are to:
- Give the community of contributors meaningful input into the learning platform roadmap
- Prioritize the biggest opportunities for advancing the platform in the next six months
- Avoid duplicated effort — waste — in the Open edX community and facilitate collaboration
- Capture value of unmerged code developed by the community
- Publish and maintain a shared Open edX platform roadmap
The initial version of the program will start with a public “Call for Opportunities.”
We are going to use a new artifact for capturing opportunities called an “opportunity brief.” Briefs will be terse documents, around 400 words, that provide enough information for reviewers to understand the proposal, develop a point of view, or follow up questions. You can find an exemplar Opportunity Brief here.
Briefs should be submitted through a new Jira project, registration required. There you will also be able to see the briefs that other members of the community have submitted.
A couple of ground rules:
- Do check to see if an existing brief already exists for the opportunity that you have in mind. If that is the case, reach out to the original author so that you may collaborate to produce a better overall pitch.
- Do spend the time to create a high-quality brief. It should be terse, but provide enough information to fully convey the nature and value of the proposal to someone approaching the idea for the first time.
- Don’t create a lot of briefs capturing brain storms.
- Do make yourself available to answer questions about your proposal and respond to feedback
In early October, an invited group of long time Open edX community members and edX staff will hold a workshop to review the submissions for discussions and prioritization. That group will produce and publish our initial roadmap focusing on priorities for the next six months. We expect to publish the road map in late October.
We expect that for future iterations, we will invite more participants to the synchronous review sessions. Priority, as ever, will be given to those who contribute most to the Open edX commons.
If you have questions about or issues with submitting briefs, please contact oscm@edx.org. If the question is valuable to others, post it in the discussion for this post.
@antoviaque @nimisha mentioned that some questions came up about the Roadmap workshop in the latest Contributor Discussion. I wanted to capture them and respond to them here. I’m not sure that I know all of the questions that came up, but Nimisha mentioned the following things:
Should opportunity briefs be submitted if they are not super well developed or in draft form?
Yes! The community together can iterate on draft briefs and we are better served by capturing more opportunities than worrying overmuch about the quality of the briefs. If you have a good idea that is “rough and ready” please submit it. If fact, visibility into shared needs would be valuable in itself.
Are we committing to doing all the work for the opportunities that we submit?
No, as a group we’ll prioritize the opportunities and create a roadmap. We should all be willing to invest our efforts to realize the top priorities, but there’s no expectation that we do everything that is identified. We will end up with a story map that corresponds to named releases and we’ll work to keep batch sizes reasonable.
What is the deadline for submitting opportunity briefs?
The deadline for submitting briefs is September 30, 2020.
Please add whatever other questions folks have to this thread.
@e0d Great - that helps clarifying the outstanding questions on my side for now, thanks!
@e0d Everything seems to be clear now. Thanks for the clarification.