Announcing our public roadmap for open development

At the core of 2i2c’s service is a commitment to doing our work in a way that follows open principles and practices. We commit to doing all of our work in the open and only managing and developing open infrastructure. As part of this effort, we’re shifting our strategy to lean more heavily into co-creation with member communities and open source communities.

Today we’re excited to share a first step towards making our development process more participatory, transparent, and useful: we’re opening up our initiatives roadmap. You can find it here:

👉 2i2c.org/roadmap

You can find all of our roadmap initiatives in this GitHub repository (please comment and engage with us there!):

👉 github.com/2i2c-org/initiatives

Moving forward, the roadmap will be a key part of our service to member organizations.

Why we’re opening up our roadmap #

At 2i2c, initiatives drive most of our work. They represent major chunks of value with multiple steps needed to implement and unlock it. They range from making core infrastructure improvements to our member network, to making upstream contributions that enable new functionality on behalf of our member communities. While initiatives are generally public, they are spread across many places, and we’ve managed their prioritization, sequencing, and refinement in internal team spaces. This made it difficult for others to follow along, signal-boost, and potentially support initiatives they wanted to see done.

For this reason, we decided to build a public view of our initiatives roadmap. This reflects our current team priorities and what is coming down the pipeline.

We’ve also put our platform initiatives in a public repository. This gives us a public space for member communities (or anybody else) to discuss, collaborate, and support ideas in the open.

By opening this up, we hope to accomplish these goals:

1. Make it easier for everyone to see and influence our priorities.
2. Make it easier for member organizations to fund or collaborate on work.
3. Make it easier for open source communities to see what’s driving our contributions.
4. Make it easier to give credit to member communities that fund work.

In short, we want to model what sustainable open development can look like. Our hope is that this will both create more transparency and trust with our stakeholder communities, and invite them to tell us how we can best use our team capacity.

We hope to use a shared roadmap to funnel more resources into open source #

We also hope we can leverage this as a shared roadmap across our member communities that helps focus our attention and drive fundraising for our work. To begin, we’re inviting any member community to provide financial support for these items as a way to influence our timelines and priorities, and we’re exploring ways to facilitate fractional co-funding across our member communities to help share the cost of development across many organizations.

This is an early experiment in collaborative and radically transparent development, and we will iterate and learn as we get feedback from member communities. We’re excited to see where this goes!

Please give feedback on this idea. If you’re interested in being a member organization of 2i2c, reach out to us about membership.