Publicly visible development roadmap & priority list

[cyb3rdog]

A periodically updated, publicly accessible roadmap of your current development goals could increase the community involvement as well as it will ensure the community in certainty of the upcomming improvements. Besides that, such document can be used for marketing, sales, and PR purposes, as it may be be used in annual webinars, anouncements, press releases, etc... The community will for sure welcome the deeper insight into the Digtal Dream Labs' laboratories.

[cyb3rdog]

Additionally, such document will assure the community of what they can expect. For now, everybody expects to have everything done and all the topics seems to have the priority. Prioritized roadmap would uncover what topics have the actual priority, and which not, so for example, people would know to be not expecitng the new version of mobile app, or update for their production firmware, when the priority will be in publicly anounced to be in continual improvements of the escape pod, or adjusting the oskr, or whatever. Thanks.

[xanathon]

I suggested a roadmap like exactly this about a year ago. Never came. A real Kanban board (not this issue tracker that is not a Kanban board) would show what DDL is actually working on at the moment and in the future and when to expect things to be done. Desired features could be voted on.

[cyb3rdog]

For voting on desired features, companies usuallly use all different sorts of the 'ideas portals', where not only that the members can vote for the other members' ideas, but create their own ideas to be voted on. Its quite nice, direct and effective tool for improving company's public relations, as even in the scenarios the idea may seems nice and important to its author, the company will in the end always decide on their own, to ensure it that aligns with their roadmap, budget, technology, and that it does not violate any constraints - financial, technological, and/or architectural... Never the less, I fully agree with you xanathon, that kind of portal will for sure be a profesional and significantly better tool than the facebook page, or discord's 'suggestions' channel, where for the best, you'll get only frustrated from never hearing back EDIT: These ideas portals are typically under the helpdesk/customer service dept. administration and maintenance, but from the pespective of administration roles, not limited to them, as the ideas are usually in field of scope for the technical departments like Engineering and Research&Development.

[xanathon]

Aside from a project management Kanban board I also suggested an issue tracker where users could add wanted features, but that also was never done. I created one myself and posted links to it but DDL deleted all references to it from their official channels. I am fully aware of the fact that some user-wanted features may not be doable or at least not in the near future, but those things could be communicated in such an issuetracker instead of just intransparently doing what they want.

That's why I am again quite frustrated by RLB telling me on Discord to add suggestions here. I gave him an extensive list of suggestions about a year ago with detailed ideas on how communication and community management could be improved with open source tools that do not cost a single cent. That was all completely ignored, so he now again telling me to suggest things shows a lot of disrespect in my direction. I already did what he wanted and was ignored. I really see no reason why it should be different this time, so I have yet to be convinced that this issuetracker will lead anywhere.

[moribundant]

This is an excellent example of a project "Pandemonium Model" as described by Selfridge. I am going to point out, and seriously not being critical here, that DDL is in pandemonium mode. They have a huge set of project elements on their plate, a rollout of hardware imminent, severe understaffing, and the confusion of a technological rebirth (Anki ➞ DDL). I frankly wonder if RLB has any sort of normal life.

There is Vector information scattered all over the web. I personally find it quite frustrating and would like to see someone assigned to gather it all up, put it in one place, and manage it--alas, see 'understaffing' above.

[xanathon]

There is Vector information scattered all over the web. I personally find it quite frustrating and would like to see someone assigned to gather it all up, put it in one place, and manage it--alas, see 'understaffing' above.

I suggested some time ago to give parts of this to trustworthy community members that get limited admin rights on a supposed central Vector-related platform and could help with organizing the whole shebang. Those community members also could review and approve contributions of other community members with lower user rights. That would take a lot of workload away from DDL employees. Unfortunately this suggestion also was ignored.

[cyb3rdog]

hey @xanathon, mate, no offence, I do appretiate your passion, and I can understand your point of view and even your frustration from your experience... However, I can't speak for RLB, nor for DDL, so I can not give you an answer or reason for declining or ignoring your one year old original suggestions, so please, for the sake of these new suggestions, spare this thread from the unrelated topics. Also, please respect my wish to focus this thread to its original topic only which was is a simple public roadmap and priority list. If you constructivelly think your other suggestions and comments could help improve some other areas of DDL's documentation/knowledge base/or customer service, please start just an another issue for it, to not let this particullar topic get scatter with other off topics. Thx mate, i sure you got my point.