[Roadmap] Ideas for 2022 Q3 Sprint 1 Prioritisation

[BenJam]

This is the discussion to begin surfacing ideas for Q3S1 (25th July to 2nd September).

Surfacing Ideas

While we've continued to iterate the process we use to drive (principally) development of the platform we have noticed that we often discuss ideas at face value as part of prioritisation. @iamronen put it best in his assessment:

when it's time to eat we open the fridge and see what we can throw together, no one's thinking about and preparing a menu.

To counter this we would like to bring a little more attention to the process of readying ideas for prioritisation, Which starts with surfacing them here, in this discussion.

How to use this discussion

Surfacing an idea looks very similar to ideas that have been shared in previous discussions we ask that you think about problems, (not solutions) and the impact of those problems. Consider the following questions:

• Who is your user?
• What are they trying to achieve?

Strategic Priorities

• [Strategic Focus] Interoperability  #5488
• [Strategic Focus] Communication #5487
• [Strategic Focus] Simplification  #5486

It's useful to use the following format when trying to reflect this:

When ____ , I want to ___ , so I can ___

We ask submitters to select problems that have both a high degree of impact and a high degree of alignment with our focus areas. If there's an existing issue, please reference it, if not please click here to create one.

We encourage everyone to surface ideas as early as possible so that we can start working toward a project pitch before the next prioritisation week (July 18th).

During the sprint (in parallel with development) we work together to create a pitch that can then be reviewed in prioritisation.

If you'd like to read more about pitches, or generally find out more about our preferred approach to development check out Shape Up by Ryan Singer (it's free)

Another process iteration? What's the goal?

The goals for this change are: a greater degree of shared understanding, less pressure on sprint facilitators to understand every aspect of a problem in order to inform the prioritisation process and a smoother development process as engineers have more context at the outset.

[Memo-Es]

Onboarding flow - Find a host #5672

Stage: Revisiting the shaped solution and writing a pitch.

[alanna]

Stop users getting blocked in the expense flow

Due to problems with error validation and the form, users can get stuck in unresolvable states of the flow. This creates a broken experience for them so I think we should fix it.

• Improve validations when inviting expense payee #5020
• Incomplete payout details breaks invite expense flow #5306
• Unable to cancel editing expense #5429
• Mandatory fields not marked when inviting organization to submit an expense #5222

[Memo-Es]

• 1 to prioritize this for the next sprint, it is contained enough and a great improvement for the invite expense flow

Stage: Ready to be pitched

[iamronen]

created issue and added to product board as P2 ready for pitching #5681

[Memo-Es]

Adding #5697 here to include it in this set of expense improvements

[alanna]

#5230 Trigger Collective onboarding emails for new admins

We have an onboarding email series for creators of new Collectives, but don't do anything to give the same info to new admins of existing Collectives - it would be super helpful for their onboarding.

[iamronen]

@BenJam please have a look at this as it relates to notifications and may relate to the minimum number of admins change.

@alanna : Can you assign this a priority?

counting days since they accepted the admin invite instead of days since the Collective was created.

This part of the requirement feels like a potential complication (depending on the architecture of the timing mechanism).
One possible way to avoid this complication (while still delivering the value to the new admin) is to create a new notification for "new admin confirms invitation" and include in it the content from both messages in one message (note to notification authors: if in the future you change the notification sent to the first admin you also need to update the message sent to additional admins)

[alanna]

I have never understood how to assign priority really, sorry. This affects certain Collectives a lot (e.g. pretty much all Gift Collective admins completely miss out on the onboarding series, because I'm the one who creates the Collectives, plus all Collectives that go through an admin transition to someone not familiar with our platform), and this meaningfully impacts those Collective's outcomes and engagement. But it's a minority of Collectives that are in that situation. So wherever that fits into the prioritisation rubric.

[BenJam]

I've taken a look. @Memo-Es are you considering this as part of the #4829 project?

[Memo-Es]

As I posted inside the issue:

I agree with @BenJam. We might want to create a new series of onboarding emails specifically for new admins of an existing Collective; the work then is to craft the content of these emails and add the respective templates in the database.

[BenJam]

@Memo-Es my question is: is this on your radar and should it not be prioritised because you've already set the next priority (find a host) for the onboarding work?

[alanna]

#2734 Enable recurring bank transfer contributions

This one continues to get requested, and as the NZ hosts scale it will get more important (everything is done by bank transfer here). This also causes confusion when a host doesn't have stripe/paypal set up, and people click "contribute" then change to "recurring" and get hit with "no payment methods available" (see #4669).

[iamronen]

@BenJam I think this needs your attention.

[BenJam]

We've discussed this previously and, as @Betree has highlighted, there is a workaround using PayPal.

Implementing this 'properly' requires a significant investment to remove some of the assumptions in our model and to perhaps support SEPA and ACH payments. @kewitz took a look at SEPA back in 2019 and I don't think anything has changed. Stripe have reasonable support for this but it's a significant project.

As a result my question back to you @alanna is, how big is the market for this solution? Specifically the NZ projects and large host you mention here? Last year collectives hosted by OCNZ received ~$65,000 for which it collects a 5% fee. To put that into perspective we'll probably spend ~$15-20k implementing this feature and I do think it's important to at least bear that in mind.

[kewitz]

To be honest, I'm more interested in working with digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay because I think they're easy to implement and they address global payment problems.

SEPA will only address European payments which can be justified by OCEU and a huge potential market in Europe overall.
Also, people in NL are requesting support for iDEAL payments, which is yet another localized market payment method. #5618 (comment)

[natehn]

Noting here that there was also some discussion when this was submitted last sprint.

[znarf]

SEPA will only address European payments which can be justified by OCEU

No, most Hosts can accept SEPA if we use the Stripe integration. This is huge for Business and Individuals willing to contribute from their european bank account.

https://stripe.com/docs/payments/sepa-debit

[alanna]

#3433 Upload attachments to expense comments

There's a large new host starting up in Australia who needs this, and it's been requested many times by users. I think it would simplify the process because the alternative is something like creating a google drive and linking to it from an expense comment but that's quite tricky when not all expense submitters have access to the google drive, etc etc. For Hosts, it's very helpful to keep all related documentation in one place: the expense.

[Memo-Es]

Stage: Ready to be pitched

[natehn]

I second this and previously pitched it for Q2S2.

[Betree]

To clarify, this is about allowing PDFs in the rich text editors for expense comments. We already support attaching images.

[alanna]

#5407 Legal name field when creating new user for added funds

Sometimes the desired display name is not the legal name of the donor, but Hosts must have the legal name recorded against the transaction. We can't rely on the contributor to go in an edit their legal name later when it comes to added funds transactions, so we should enable Host admins to enter it.

[BenJam]

asked a quick question as i wonder whether there's a harder req for c3 hosts to collect legal names on the platform.

[alanna]

Everything related to compliance is harder for tax deductible hosts (not just US c3s, we have charity hosts in NZ and Aus and other places too). But it's very good practice for all hosts to be able to record the names of contributors where possible for tax reporting purposes. Money laundering is actually a significant risk in our model and this is one tool for fighting it.

[Betree]

+1 for the consistency, that's a super simple change

[alanna]

Invoice expenses must have payee address

Compliance requirement we are missing in some cases.

• Invoice expenses must have payee address #5232
• Add host address to expenses when payee is a collective #5341

[Memo-Es]

I suggest bundling up this one together with the rest of the expenses maintenance issues #5665 (comment)

[alanna]

#5171 Update receipt when transaction is refunded

This one is especially important for tax-deductible hosts, as people should not be able to get documentation saying they are entitled to a tax deduction on money that was refunded.

[BenJam]

I'll take a look at this.

[alanna]

More root actions

Bringing this one that @znarf suggested last time back in, because things like this save some of the most limited capacity we have, programmer and support hours.

• Ability to add/invite admins to a Collective
• Ability to move an Expense from a Collective to a Project/Event (and opposite)

[alanna]

@znarf could you create an issue for this?

[alanna]

#5678 Improve cover image cropper

Suggested by @carolineawoolard last time. I keep running into this myself and it negatively impacts the experience of setting up a Collective and how it's presented to the world. I set up all the Gift Collective Collectives (due to how our onboarding process works) and I get caught on this every time.

[alanna]

I don't know because 95% of my job is not about product and therefore I don't have space in my brain to load all the wider context, nor the time to do user interviews, gather data, etc. All I can say is, at least a few people have mentioned that this feels broken, and that displaying images well/poorly on profile pages makes an impact on the experience. To do a full assessment of relative priorities, we need someone whose job it is to hold that and can receive this kind of "flood" and process it however required to end up with a good result. If you put blockers on people sharing this kind if feedback, we will be missing all the voices of people whose main role is not product.

[alanna]

This is quite 'meta', but there is important context behind how this idea ended up on this list. This came from Caroline, who is not a programmer and hasn't felt like it was very accessible to put things forward into the sprint process until recently - but who brings a critically important perspective about comms (esp visual), engagement, UX, and accessibility. I would personally, for myself, probably never put an issue like this at the top of my list, because I'm not really a visual person. I wanted Caroline on the team specifically because she thinks differently to me, and sees different important, different things. This is representative of bigger issues around accessibility and diversity of inputs to prioritisation. We have to ensure there is a very accessible, low barrier way to drop in ideas and express needs. It great that you're thinking about deeper processes and more thoughtful traige, but realistically you can't outsource that back onto the people making suggestions, or you'll just miss out on input from everyone who doesn't have the time/inclination. We need to build up internal capacity on the team, to do that context building, triage, and analysis work. It has to be part of some one's, or some team's, job, because making it everyone's job isn't really feasible.

[Memo-Es]

I built here on the context of this issue and bundled it along with a couple of other issues related @alanna

[iamronen]

Thank you @alanna for adding the "meta" context. I agree with you that allowing for more inclusive participation in shaping the platform is an important aspiration. For many years I sat on the sidelines of the open-source world with the confusion of not being able to offer input because I didn't speak the language or use the tools or have ideas that didn't fit into the existing paradigms. I would like to believe that extending the prioritization process from a few days to an entire cycle (and potentially longer) opens the door to more experimentation with how to do this.

We need to build up internal capacity on the team

Yes, I believe this IS the current priority and we need to build this up as a well established internal capacity before inviting more input. As I have recently learned from you, these things need more time then we tend to give them :)

[iamronen]

some comments on the context of this issue:

1. The proposed title is misleading, because indeed it is about more than the image cropper.
2. The fact that some things are editable on the profile page and some are not is indeed confusing. I do believe it is better to be consistent about this, but I feel there are more important things to do about the profile page then allowing for inline-editing. I intend to speak more to this when we get to discussing the profile page redesign.
3. The image-cropper can definitely use improvement, but before that I feel that the way cover images show up on profile pages needs to be reconsidered ... I hardly notice images on profile pages ... so much sure I am not even sure if/how often they are used. This issue will benefit from being considered within the context of the profile page redesign (and I believe @Memo-Es has bundled it there).
4. Caroline's request to add/edit team members resonates with an item on the OSC wish-list to make open-source project teams visible - not just admins and not just maintainers.

[alanna]

#5395 Grant expenses should be opt-in by host

Currently grant expenses are on by default for Projects. This doesn't make much sense - why only Projects? If we are making a decision that they should default to on, they should be on for Collectives too. However, I strongly think grant expenses should be off by default. Hosts rely on our carefully designed invoice and receipt expense forms to capture required details for expense accounting, and grants go around all that (as a very generic kind of form). Hosts that use grants should think about if and how they want to receive such expenses, not get surprised when someone first submits one via a Project.

[iamronen]

ready for pitching added to product board,

[Memo-Es]

#5680 Collective profile page revamp

Additional to #5665 (comment), this project is about scheduling some time to define this project further to have a clear path forward to improve it.

[Memo-Es]

It is ready to be pitched the way I see it, will do it between today and tomorrow

[iamronen]

This is creating some confusion for me.

To my understanding @Memo-Es your intention was to use this as a placeholder for shaping work to be done during the next cycle.

If that is the case I am not sure this is necessary or the right place for it. In my mind that board is for things going into development. Things that we are working on shaping should only arrive here when they are ready to be pitched for developmemt.

If however, my understanding is incorrect, and you mean that the new profile page is already designed, then I would like to have a chance to look at the new designs before they are pitched.

[Memo-Es]

@iamronen I kinda want to stop using the "shaping," "ready to be pitched," etc. because no one but us understands them :)

The lifecycle of a project, the way I see it, is like this:

Identify > Definition phase > Design > Development > Repeat

With that structure in mind, this project is in the Definition + Design phase, I have the feeling that you are considering design work as part of the shaping phase, but in my mind, it has its phase before pushing to dev.

[iamronen]

@Memo-Es I look forward to discussing this further in our bi-weekly call.

1. I have added Add Financial Overview Visualizations to Collective Profile Pages #5704 to this prioritization as a demonstration of what shaping can be. I think we have been misusing the term shaping and that needs to be corrected. I also agree that we will need to both become more clear and coherent about this within product & design and then communicate to the rest of the team about our discoveries and choices.
2. I think the actual lifecycle of a project is more complex then what you described. Your description does not account for a multi-issue perspective - for example where does prioritization sit in the lifecycle? Prioritization is a process that looks at a set of projects as a whole. In order for that to happen, some work needs to take place before prioritization. Without this preparatory work prioritization is at best symbolic and mostly a rubber stamping process.
3. An example of why this matters is what has been happening with Email Notification in Q2S2. I think that this issue was not clearly understood before it was prioritized and allocated engineering resources and as result has been more costly to develop than it could have been.
4. For OSC a redesign of the profile page is an interesting and valuable project. I think there is more to it then is currently captured in [Project] Profile page iteration #5680 which is why it does not feel to me ready to be prioritized. I would like to hear more about your thoughts and plans for the redesign, to collect my own thoughts on this and to share them with you so that we can shape a more comprehensive pitch.
5. If you feel it is necessary, it is to separately prioritize some of the issues currently aggregated in [Project] Profile page iteration #5680

[Memo-Es]

@iamronen, thank you for your take on this one; I feel excited to work on this project; I know it is a big issue!

• Don't you think we can prioritize this project for the next sprint and have a round of shaping, idea sharing, and consensus as part of the shaping stage? I would say that's the right way to follow up with this project
• Furthermore, during the prioritization round of conversations, we could prioritize 1 or 2 minor issues inside this issue that are ready for implementation (i.e., improving the cropping functionality Improve cover image cropper #5678)

[kewitz]

#5431 Feature: Manage pending Expenses and Charges

A new modal/view where users can see their pending expenses whether that is a recurring expense draft, a virtual card charge missing receipt or an expense marked as incomplete.

[iamronen]

@BenJam please take a look at this

to me this seems like a P4, maybe after release and adoption of recurring expenses it becomes a P3?

[kaylarep]

#4556 Collective Admins want to Track Balance on Virtual Cards

We get requests for this very frequently.

As a host admin, our collectives do not have an intuitive way of knowing how much they're spending (especially if multiple people are using the card.)

They end up making as purchases as much as they can, eventually getting declined, reaching out for card balance increases (often times urgently because the payment needs to be by a certain deadline e.g. a storage unit, an Airbnb that requires a deposit within 24 hours), and we usually grant it.

Some of our collectives are up to $8000/month , because we don't want to restrict their usage (especially when they have an OC budget to cover); but this constant granting of increase doesn't feel scaleable or reliable.

[iamronen]

closed by @BenJam

[natehn]

I personally do not think this should be closed. Collectives would like to be able to see where they are in relation to the monthly limit.

[kaylarep]

Papercut: #5689 Collective cards in the 'Contributions' section of their host: Appear as they do in search queries (with tags & budget)

As a fiscal host, this would help with amplification of our hosted groups. If people visit the hosts's OC page, they can easily see more detailed info about the hosted collectives.

[iamronen]

I suggest looking at this as part of #5680

[kaylarep]

#5695 Allow virtual card assignees to pause/freeze their own card

I can't think of any reasons why this wouldn't be ok. If anyone can, please share!

[iamronen]

@BenJam I've added this to the product board as requires shaping (not ready for pitching)

[BenJam]

I think it's reasonably good to go as is.

[kaylarep]

#5696 Notifications for virtual card purchases

As requested by a collective admin. This would provide helpful oversight for collective admins- especially since multiple people sometimes use the same card number.

[iamronen]

added to board by @BenJam

[alanna]

Manually subscribe to Updates #1445

This one has potential big impact for our "communication" priority. It's been consistently requested since 2018 and it could be time. By way of evidence, Updates is a regularly used feature and it would be even more used if it could function more like a newsletter people could sign up for. We currently see users hacking a workaround using a free event to enable someone to become a 'contributor' without paying and thus subscribe. This indicates people want this feature, and if we properly supported it, it could add value. Other crowdfunding and donation management tools emphasise comms and engagement as a very important factor in fundraising success, and community engagement is one of OC's main value-adds as a product.

[natehn]

It was recently requested again on Slack.

[BenJam]

jeeeeeeeees that's a big thread. Seems like @Betree has done all the necessary work and that there's a reasonably simple approach there.

[Memo-Es]

I really like the challenge presented in this issue! I think it needs some design exploration to flesh out a coherent MVP and shape the other little things that complete the experience: Managing subscriptions, the concept of membership levels for communities (And stop calling everyone just contributors), the concept of having a way to interact with Collectives without the need of contributing financially (i.e., a 'like' or 'kudos') among other things Big +1!

Status: Need some shape-up work

[iamronen]

added to product board as requires shaping

[emberwry]

#5033 create tick box for paypal fees to be paid by expensee (like we have for wise)

Right now, if someone is paying out most or all of their collective balance to a wise transfer, we (host admin) can tick "the payee is covering the fees" when there isn't quite enough to cover payment processing fees in the balance. We really need this option for paypal payments as well. This has come up a few different ways and looks like it's ongoing (since 2018!), and it definitely results in human error (redundant payments, clunky manually changing amounts and re-approving).

[znarf]

Check #5033 for latest update.

[iamronen]

this seems like a dead-end, can the issue be closed?

[alanna]

Collective activity log #5195

We've done some good scoping and design work on this one that was prioritised last sprint already - I hope we can continue and implement soon. cc @Memo-Es

[Memo-Es]

The design will be ready this sprint; we talked about pushing it directly to implementation for the next one
cc @znarf

[iamronen]

@Memo-Es can I reassign this issue to the Q3S1 board for pitching?
(it will disappear from the current Q2S2 board).

[Memo-Es]

Yeah @iamronen all good

[kewitz]

#5435 Wise: Refactor expense payment to create Transactions only when transfer is concluded

Technical debt, we should make Wise expenses consistent with all other payout methods.

[iamronen]

added to product board for pitching

[BenJam]

Adding as a rollover as we're unlikely to manage it this last sprint:

Updating OSC's eligibility criteria and onboarding process

Open Source Collective receives 5-6 applications a day, of which perhaps 1 is appropriate, with 1 a week is a great fit for us. Regardless of this we have to do the runaround making sure that the project actually meets the criteria that we care about:

• the licence
• the history of activity and the community
• the usage

The documentation for these changes are in GH here and in GitBook here.

in the meantime, we automatically sign up a number of projects that aren't appropriate, because we use a proxy metric (number of stars) to judge whether a project should be accepted or not. This results in a lot of garbage (see above) projects being automatically accepted.

Open Source Collective is going to update its eligibility criteria Open-Source-Collective/osc#3 as a result, we need to update:

• the automatic approval process through GitHub
• the form for project not authenticated through GitHub (and open source adjacent projects)

Specs and some research for both are in Open-Source-Collective/osc#4

[Betree]

#3438 Redesign the page to edit tiers

Been pushing for this one for two years now, I won't despair 🤪

• I think it has a great alignment with the [Strategic Focus] Simplification #5486 .
• Most collectives go through this flow that we're not proud of when they sign up.
  You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
• We identified this as a problem to implement further enhancements in multiple projects (Receipts for non-tax-deductible payments #5368, Add the ability to require custom information in the contribution flow #1798).

As mentioned in #5330 (comment), I believe there is a way to simplify the implementation of this by relying on bounties. I actually have a PR started in opencollective/opencollective-frontend#7403 that just deserves a bit of attention to properly kick-off the project.

Expected load on the engineering team:

• To create the skeleton: Medium (we probably want to do the listing part ourselves as the drag'n'drop feature deserves some refactoring)
• To create the specs: Simple
• To review the contributor's PRs: Medium. We can control the load by assigning the issues progressively

[Betree]

This would also help us move forward with technical debt, some components that we're mostly ready to kill are only used there. See #4830

[iamronen]

@BenJam do you have time to look at this and decide how to place it for prioritization?

[Memo-Es]

Big +1 to this one has recently come up in my calls about improving the contribution experience.

[BenJam]

The case for investing in tiers is strong from a use point of view:

@iamronen and I have been looking at this from the perspective of Open Source Collective helping collectives describe their ambitions and to link them to targets, tiers could be a part of that. If we don';t prioritise is this sprint i can see us putting OSC's weight behind it soon.

[Memo-Es]

Contribution flow improvements (1st Round) Issue pending

We prioritized #4893 for this sprint as a research project to find out what was related to this issue for us to provide a more holistic solution and not jump to conclusions.

The research process revealed that this issue is about improving the contribution experience in general certainly #4893 is one angle but not the only one, so I suggest considering this 'campaign' in a similar way as the #4829 and #5501, and dedicate some time next sprint to take a look collectively at this and shape it a bit more (Define concise projects and prioritize them)

[jfdh]

Help Host Admin to mark expenses as incomplete faster #5713

As a Host Admin, I want to use the new "Mark as Incomplete" feature from the expenses list. I want to save time by not having to open the particular expense to mark it as incomplete.

As we already have a preview of the attachment accessible from the expenses list, as well as the "Go to Pay" action available, it seems that the "Mark as Incomplete" action is the piece missing here.

Strategic Priority: Simplification
High frequency - High impact

[kaylarep]

#5318 Sharing up-to-date press/media about e2c

If we don't do the airtable idea, at minimum, changing the order of the 'Resources' at the bottom.

to me, upon first glance, it just looks like the most recent article is from oct 18, 2021, not very recent.
at the very least, if we want to keep the oldest first, then i think the 'Resources' shouldnt be a carousel, but a list where you can view it all at once.

that's the only place on the whole page that shows any ongoing movement about e2c. without it, its a stagnant page of information, no idea of last update/if the conversation is even still going on.

[kaylarep]

#5722 Edits to auto-emails for Virtual Cards

• hoping these shouldn't be too time-consuming. a couple things to discuss in here, but those conversations can happen at another time.

[BenJam]

Notifications settings

Apologies for the delay here but, given what's been happening with the current sprint, I wanted to make sure that our request is accurate. Looking again at what was proposed last sprint #5511 (comment)

I propose that we make some quick fixes to email-based communication:

• Allow admins to set a specific email address for contact requests [Project] Customize ways to contact #2263
• include email to host admins when contacting a pending collective

and start to tackle #3357 by

• introducing one overall setting (maybe essential, recommended, all)
  - ESSENTIAL (payment receipts, payouts, card payments, actions)
  - RECOMMENDED (confirmations of actions taken by others, platform drip onboarding)
  - ALL (inc updates and conversations)*

AFIAK we are not going to complete the overall setting this sprint. Instead we've somehow implemented the more complex customisation options described later in the document. We I propose tackling these problems again.

Notifications content review

In addition, I think we should review the quality fo the emails that we send from a content, language and design point of view.

[iamronen]

This discussion is closed.
Ideas for prioritization can now be submitted for Q3S2: #5741

[kaylarep]

@iamronen that link sends back to this same page

[iamronen]

thank you @kaylarep - corrected!