[DOCS] Define Roadmap for 2024

[aaronreed708]

Problem/Concern

The goal of this issue is to come up with a roadmap and vision for 2024 efforts. The resulting document should be posted to the Theme Builder Wiki. Any contributor should feel free to add comments to this issue, to nominate ideas, suggest requirements, bring attention to important dates/events, and generally give this effort some tangible points for discussion. We'll then convene a meeting to discuss the roadmap, prioritize efforts, build a timeline, etc.

[aaronreed708]

tagging with "community" as this will certainly involve enhancements suggested by the Community Working Group headed by @PaulaPaul

[PaulaPaul]

Hoping to have a breakout room at State of Open Con in February for participants to openly discuss their accessibility challenges and incorporate community feedback in the roadmap- @lwnoble I will follow up with the State of Open Con team and arrange a breakout room (ideally following the presentation, or a working lunch...)

[PaulaPaul]

The biggest hurdle -

It's not easy for people who have existing design systems; we need an integration and adoption story. Ideally this should be incremental. How can we take the BYOC needs and map them to Theme Builder Can we leverage AI to explain existing codebases and how to incrementally adopt Theme Builder

• Generating Theme Builder tokens for existing design system

Once we have that this can really go for broad adoption! Can we create a demo that uses AI (Paula is working with Google's AI Platform and this is a terrific use case) to adapt Theme Builder into existing design systems (BYOC)

• Target an AI demo of this for the Grace Hopper Celebration and community building (potentially partner with Google - Paula will explore)

@lwnoble has a vision outlined in the slides for State of Open Con- We can have a theme for our 2024 roadmap that focuses on enabling adoption for those who have existing design systems and codebases, beginning with the messaging for state of open con and amplifying that through the year, and building aspirational demos that show the concepts of this vision -

[PaulaPaul]

The sessions and feedback from State of Open Con24 (where Cody and Lise presented Theme Builder) supported the key themes of the roadmap above - also, the ability to select and verify the level of WCAG compliance (including testing) is a common need.

@aaronreed708 and @lwnoble, for our next project call if we can agree on a location for Roadmaps in the Theme Builder repo I can draft a page for Roadmap information, and once that page is merged to main we can close this issue if you are amenable. If you would like to comment here with suggestions/ideas I can work on them in advance of our project call. Thanks!

The core roadmap items (Bring Your Own, level of WCAG compliance, improved DesignOps toolchain) are related to these existing issues that could be tagged for 'vNext' Roadmap issues somehow:

• 347

• 460

• 463

• 466

• 532

• 536

• 681

• 746

Once we have agreement on the themes for a 'vNext' roadmap we can tag issues related to the roadmap - for discussion below and at project calls-

[PaulaPaul]

For these Roadmap items we chatted about potential approaches on the community call-

• Bring Your Own (this is an Epic or Theme level roadmap item) -- Need to follow up with people we spoke with at the conference and previously (Discover, Citi, Fidelity, Capital One/Cody, NatWest in a few months) and see if we can get information about their existing design systems to define some kind of assessment, that kind of assessment will lead to feature requests for tooling)

• level of WCAG compliance (This seems like a Feature level roadmap item) -- Existing capabilities?

• improved DesignOps toolchain (Seems like an Epic or collection of Features?) -- Identified some existing issues

• Improved accessibility testing -- Deque examples with axe or other open source A11y testing tools -- for Bring your own, show the test results before and after adopting Theme Builder (show results!)

• AI support? Experiment with generating or assessing using generative AI?

@aaronreed708 suggested we look into PenPot as an open source design tool, to support both Figma and PenPot

• https://penpot.app

[PaulaPaul]

Cody and @PaulaPaul chatted about doing a talk on BYOD (Bring Your Own Design-System) at the next FINOS events, and submitting to the CFP. @aaronreed708 @lwnoble - we can open a Community issue to create abstracts for the 2024 FINOS summits (June / Nov)

[codyzu]

Should we think about having a turnkey solution to use the theme-builder CSS with materiel UI. I'm thinking a npm package that includes a set of components and the necessary react bindings to make it be themed by the theme builder generated theme.

[aaronreed708]

That is an interesting thought. A great thing to ask people as we meet them at Community gatherings. To me it seems likely that most established companies will already be invested in a widget library even as they play with new design systems. But I could be completely wrong. Perhaps companies looking for new design systems are very open to a new widget library. Existing MUI customers would have the easiest time, of course, but it will be interesting when we start working with those types of users to see how much custom styling may break when it is melded with Theme Builder. Hopefully it will prove minimal.

I guess Theme Builder itself would naturally be the first customer if we decide to go down this route!

[codyzu]

With @lwnoble , we think having a "formal" roadmap, accessible from the repo or the website would be a great way to move forward with an official roadmap.