⚡️ Product update: feature requests monitor, redesign implementation and upcoming releases

Dear Decidimers,

In this post we report on:

a) the progress in the implementation of the redesign.

b) a new organization of the Propose New Features process, in order to facilitate the understanding and coordination of new proposals for improving Decidim.

Implementation of the new design and upcoming releases

Progress is slow, due to several reasons:

• At the administrative level, and due to the problem with the grant, Andrés can’t assume the review tasks he had been performing so far. To mitigate this absence and until he can return to his duties, the maintainers team has been reinforced via the City Council AM contract with a new incorporation, Alexandru Lupu. But he’ll need a period of time until he is familiar with the tasks to be done. This only reiterates the need for the Association to have the resources to ensure the stability of its own technical team.
  
  
• At the technical level, we had a discussion about the drawers, due to the problems that were being found during their implementation. We decided to temporarily waive it, which implies costs in time and effort because of the changes that need to be made.

As we anticipated in the last post, the release dates were approximate and could vary. As of today it is unlikely that the first one (March 2023) can be met. We hope that during the month of February the pace of development can advance at a certain speed, since the priority is to release version 0.28 with the redesign of the frontend completed.

That means that the guidelines to receive new contributions remain in place. Furthermore, until we achieve a certain pace with the redesign, we won't be accepting new PRs for features, so as not to add any additional overhead that slows down that pace.

Improvements to the “Propose New Features” process

As part of the new year's resolutions we’ve been figuring out a way to organize the feature requests in order to:

• To be able to give feedback from Product about a feature more quickly.
• To elaborate a more detailed backlog and grouping similar proposals.
• To have a dashboard where you can easily check what is included in the next version, what is the funded backlog (i.e., the short-term roadmap), and the state of development in general.

First of all, we have expanded the process explanation, go and take a look! We added some context, and updated the criteria used by the Product team to accept new contributions.

Secondly, we want to start implementing a new way of organizing the pool of proposals:

This dashboard will incorporate all proposals (except those rejected), grouped into results and classified into the following categories:

• Backlog: these are proposals accepted to be part of the backlog, differentiated between those with funding and those with funding.
• In Progress: proposals/developments that are being carried out to be included in the next version.
• Done: finished developments.

In the next few days we will begin to apply it, but in the meantime let us know what you think of the proposal, and if we can do something to improve it. Thanks!