[RFC] Add a roadmap section to the site

[jlengstorf]

It seems like we've got a lot of great RFCs and feature discussions happening, but it's a little hard to track what's been prioritized or is under active development.

Something fun and helpful that we could build is a "roadmap" page for the gatsbyjs.org site that could either be (ranked by how I feel about them):

1. ☹️ A manually edited Markdown file with features that are under active development and links to the issues/PRs
2. 😐 A mix of Markdown for big goals (e.g. Gatsby v2) and a link to open PRs and/or a GitHub Project
3. 🙂 A dynamically generated list of issues and PRs that are placed into a "Gatsby Roadmap" GitHub Project
4. 😄 Same as Add option to CLI for verbose/noisy vs. quiet output. Default to quiet #3, but also reading issue labels to sort for things like priority, "good first contribution", etc.

This might be more work than it's worth, but if we define a solid workflow for moving from RFC => todo => WIP => merged, we could put those into a Gatsby Roadmap GitHub Project with columns matching the stages of progress. Whenever the site rebuilds, it could read the project's issues from the API and build a list of planned, active, and completed projects.

The big questions around this are:

1. How feasible is it to keep issues organized in a project with as many contributors as we have?
2. How much work is involved in creating a gatsby-source-github plugin that could get us access to the GitHub Project?

• This may already exist — we can evaluate https://github.com/ldd/gatsby-source-github-api to make sure it does what we need

3. How much value does this add?

• I would argue that this is a big value add for people who aren't super familiar with GitHub or who are overwhelmed by the GitHub Issues interface. It could help potential contributors quickly find high-value contributions. As we start onboarding more and more non-technical users (e.g. [RFC] Create Gatsby desktop app with focus on helping non-programmers start and develop and publish Gatsby sites #4201), it could help them understand what features are on the way.

There's a chance that this'll end up being a bit too ambitious, but it seems like it could be a great way to show off the power of Gatsby and create a better at-a-glance overview of the project's status, progress, goals, and direction.

I'd love to get feedback on whether or not you think this is a worthwhile project. ❤️

[KyleAMathews]

@DavidWells didn't you do something like this for Serverless? I remember you showing me something a while ago. Would love to hear about how Serverless thought about it!

[DavidWells]

⊂◉‿◉つ

I created the https://github.com/serverless/scope to help wrangle issues for the serverless project.

We use it here https://serverless.com/framework/status/. It's a self contained "third party" JS react app that can be embedded anywhere.

In a nutshell, it lets you funnel issues/PRs with a given github label into a column grouping of your choosing. It also helps highlight issues like "help wanted" etc. You can see that in the demo.

This video series explains it all in (too much) detail https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTrPeKZ0JxI&list=PLIIjEI2fYC-BtxWcDeTziRp7cIZVEepB3

If you have a sane tagging structure setup in your github repo, it's pretty easy to setup one (or as many as you want) and embed them on a site.

Holler if you want help setting it up @KyleAMathews

[m-allanson]

👍 for a roadmap.

For point 1. as @DavidWells says, this could be done via a good labelling system. I think two categories of labels, type and status would be a good start?

Expand this for a couple of examples.

In serverless they have these labels:

kind/bug
kind/docs
kind/enhancement
kind/feature
kind/question
kind/refactoring
kind/tests

stage/accepted
stage/in-progress
stage/in-review
stage/needs-feedback
stage/wait-cf-support
status/more-info-needed 

And in stylelint they have these labels:

type: bug
type: documentation
type: enhancement
type: infrastructure
type: new option
type: new rule
type: refactor
type: tests 

status: blocked
status: discussion
status: needs clarification
status: needs investigation
status: wip

---

For point 3. I think a roadmap is also really useful for people who're familiar with GitHub. To me a good roadmap signals that a project is well organised and actively maintained, which is a big plus when evaluating a new tool.

[jlengstorf]

@DavidWells this is doooooooope.

@KyleAMathews @m-allanson Does Scope look like a good fit for Gatsby?

@m-allanson I was just talking about how much I love labeling, so I'm way into creating a sane label structure. I opened #4311 to get a discussion going to make this happen.

[KyleAMathews]

I think a roadmap page with a high-level overview for the goals of the project in general and specifically what we're working towards in v2, v3, etc. would be perfect.

Pulling in links automatically might make sense. I don't know if a high-level page would benefit much though from detailed page links and getting the tagging and sorting working seems more difficult than it's worth. Just link people to the project page(s).

I don't think we need Scope (Sorry David...) — we already have GitHub Projects.

[gatsbot]

Old issues will be closed after 30 days of inactivity. This issue has been quiet for 20 days and is being marked as stale. Reply here or add the label "not stale" to keep this issue open!

[jlengstorf]

We’ve done the labeling part of this, but would still benefit from surfacing issues. @marisamorby is cooking up ideas around this goal in #9634, so I'll close this in favor of that effort.