As some of you may have seen at our last Open Hours, our roadmap has a new look. The previous version was fed directly from our GitHub milestones. This meshed nicely with how we operate at DataCite, but we heard from many of you that GitHub wasn’t so intuitive for providing feedback if it wasn’t already something you use every day. Since we weren’t getting as much feedback as we’d like, we decided to change up our roadmap to make it a bit easier to contribute.
We’ve now switched to a new tool that we hope will make it a bit easier to provide feedback as you follow along with our roadmap. The roadmap still lives in the same place at https://datacite.org/roadmap.html. You’ll see that it’s now divided into sections based on how solid of an idea something is. This starts with an idea that’s just “under consideration” in its earliest stage and goes all the way through to a completed feature that’s “launched”.
The most important part for all of you is the feedback element. Click on any of the idea cards to let us know how important that idea is to you and any comments you have that might be helpful for us to understand your needs. The roadmap will ask for your email address, which we’ll use in the event we need to ask you follow-up questions. Behind the scenes, all of your feedback goes into a queue where we can see how it fits with what others are saying and use it to refine the ideas displayed in the roadmap. You can also propose new ideas via the roadmap, and those will go into the same feedback queue for consideration.
We hope you’ll give the new roadmap a try and let us know what you think about where we’re headed.
