A proposal for fundraising for features

International Business models
20

Meetings Summary

Thanks to everyone who came along to the meetings about funding features last week. They were both great meetings with huge overlap in some ways and big differences in others. It was really interesting to do the session twice and receive quite diverse input from the two different groups.

You can see the notes from both the meetings here.. If you don’t have access to the Global Drive just request when you open the doc and we’ll grant it.

Criteria

Between the sessions it was widely agreed that the following criteria were crucial for this first feature.

  • Have a clear, discrete scope: It is already well defined. This will mean no complex design processes or complex legal/product requirements on this task.
  • It is small in size. 2-3 days dev time + design, review, test. Keeping to a small size should also limit the maintenance on the feature.
  • It will have wide appeal and impact. We want many users and instances to appreciate this contribution… and to fund it!

Cautions

There were also some pretty clear cautions from folks about traps we must certainly avoid with this first feature.

  • Don’t have a fixed deadline. We are not yet good at estimating.
  • It must not be something fashionable eg AI or IoT

Delivery Process

  • We will follow our existing delivery for this task including user guide process.
  • We will offer delivery date estimates for first release on staging only. Not for completion.
  • We will estimate this task before beginning and during completion.
  • We will compare estimates with reality via time tracking
  • We will retro on the task.
  • We will select the task with a transparent process involving instance managers and delivery team.

Next Steps

To continue on this journey I propose:

  1. A session with delivery folks to go through all the features that were suggested by people in the meeting and consider them in relation to the size and scope criteria to create a shortlist of potential features that meet our delivery criteria
  1. From this shortlist I will create a survey tool to share with the community to guage which is the task with the widest appeal. We’ll need to know both if instances want it and if they think they might be able to raise funds for it from some of their users. Hopefully this will inform which feature we choose to go with.
  1. After this we can prepare the estimate, and some resources to help fundraising efforts and go out and try and raise the money… :tada:
  1. Note that so far this work is not on our Roadmap. We have a little time before we get to the point of actually needing to deliver the work so in the background via Delivery Train and Product Curation we can continue to discuss what it means to our processes to include this task in the upcoming priorities.

I just want to acknowledge that there are a lot of scary things about this process. I deeply encourage everyone to express your fears with an open heart. Everyone’s fears will help us grow wisely. Our ability to sit within the fear and continue down the path anyway takes courage… and certainly our world needs our courage right now :heart:

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