What are the goals of this project?

[adborden]

Document the goals of the project in the README so that we can:

1. Attempt to measure success against those goals.
2. Determine priorities for features.
3. Avoid creating work for ourselves by solving problems that don't exist.

[adborden]

I see a lot of issues piling up and it's unclear what we really want to tackle in this project. Are these feature requests just scratching someone's itch? Are they promoting best practices? Are they still relevant?

Having some goals would help to answer some of these questions.

[tbaxter-18f]

I think those are good questions. As I look through the issues, I think most of them are probably still valid, but I do think there are questions about where we're trying to go and how we want to get there, and whether the overall goals of this effort have moved around since it began.

For what it's worth, I believe that we have enough opinions and requirements around how a project should properly be set up that we have a very small number of ways to do it correctly, and very, very few developers will reliably remember how to comply with those opinions and and requirements when starting a new project.

So, what I'd like to see, as the eventual goal -- at a very high level -- would be a one-click install for a given project type, perhaps something like createproject django myprojectname that would give me functioning django project, complete with our logging requirements, a11y opinions, federated analytics, USWDS already installed and whatever else we believe all new projects should have.

Same for Federalist, Drupal, and any other projects we start up with any real frequency.

Admittedly, that feels different from where this was going before, at least from a messaging standpoint if not a functional standpoint, but that's what I'd like to see.