Improving communication of new and planned stuff / the CiviCRM release process

[Michael McAndrew]

Hello folks,

I think we can get better at letting people know:

* what is new and what is on the horizon for CiviCRM
* how new features get into CiviCRM (and how people can get their new features into CiviCRM) 

Would be great to know what your experiences and perspectives are on this.  If you think it is important and if you have any ideas and resources to improve what we do in this area. I definitely have some resources to help out with this at the moment, but probably bigger than a one person task.  We have talked about this before and have discussed various strategies before but I think we can still improve.  And I think that as we get larger, it is important to address it properly

And just to be clear, I don't think we are super bad at this - I just think that we could get better at it.  And I think we should get better at it because if we did so:

* people would have a better understanding of the direcion that CiviCRM is taking and why
* we'd have more people getting involved in developing new features / guiding the project / contributing resources
* new and potential users would have an easier way to evaluate what civi can do (at the moment, and in the near future) and how development happens and our community would grow more quickly as a result.

To me, the current situation feels a bit like this: if you are in the know / dealing with CiviCRM on a daily basis / going to a code sprint and conference or two a year / regularly attending to your local meet up / hanging out in IRC / actually involved in development of some part of CiviCRM, then you are likely to know about both the new and the horizon.  But if you aren't, then there is no particularly easy way to find this stuff out.
 
Since we'll always have a majority who have other priorities and can't afford to immerse themselves in Civi the whole time we need to work out some systems that make it easy for them to do that.


Below I tried to make a list of the different tools and places that we use to document and communicate this stuff:

* roadmap (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+Roadmap)
* make it happen pages
* assorted requirements and specification pages on the wiki
* the issue tracker
* release blog posts (we could probably do a better job here of outlining new functionality)
* forum blast - soon to be CiviMail Newsletter (good for end user focused info on new and planned functionality)
* documentation (we try and document all new functionality at sprints)

If you go fishing around in all these places, you will find a fair amount of info, on what is going on but it does take some effort, and info is not always up to date / is sometimes missing.

I presume it will always be somewhat chaotic / dynamic but one concrete thing we could do is spend some more time defining and documenting a release cycle, including what discussions and communications we do during each release (e.g. when and how we decide what goes into each release, where we are putting resources and why), i.e. forum posts with appropriate tags about MIH, core improvements, other sponsored projects.  We could also put in place some systems that make sure we are meeting expectations for communicating this stuff.

Another thing which would probably fall out of this is getting better at explaining what happened when we don't manage to do what we said we would do and what we can learn from it...

Interested to hear if this makes sense to people and to hear your thoughts.

Michael

[xavier]

Hi,

So from the meetup in Paris:

- most didn't upgrade to the latest version because either they didn't know it was a new one or that they didn't see the benefits

Most will upgrade thanks to the meeting, probably the "new" feature that was the most selling one from them was the edit in place (btw, they seem to prefer the "crm-editable" than the "by block").

1) Might be good to have a short video demoing the new features? "edit-in-place" is either too technical or got lost in translation and most didn't know what it meant.

2) we need to make a better place on the home page for the "new features". Might be as simple as adding a link to the roadmap that is well visible

3) Most didn't know about the MiH. Might be good to put them more clearly in the road map/new features(?)/what's cooking

X+

[Michael]

Michael,

Your thoughts are very good and I hope they will be heard and followed up on. I have spent many hours trying to find the information you described and it's very difficult to sort it all out sometimes. The website UI might want to be re-think along the same lines. For example, if a visitor to the website has never been on it before it's actually not at all easy to find the download link for CiviCRM. Most people that hear about CiviCRM and come to the site generally expect to find a "download" link prominently and obviously displayed.

If the Search remembered the visitor's search terms so they didn't have to be re-typed it would aid the process of searching by making it faster due to less typing, IMHO.

Another thing that would improve the ability to use CiviCRM confidently would be more detailed descriptions of what CiviCRM can (and in some cases "can"t) do and I think this would be in line with the current drive to get the roadmap, soon-to-be-released features, and current features online presentation better coordinated.

Anything that can save time for CiviCRM supporters and users (in terms of hunting for information especially) is a very good thing. Anything that can help get a more rapid and wider adoption can only be a good thing because the community will grow.

For the thousands of small-company type developers with limited resources, anything that can be done to reduce the price of entry in terms of both time and money (development labour costs) to make it easier to find the answers they need will be wonderful. The hundreds of thousands of small organizations that could benefit from using CiviCRM (usually with very small budgets) need to be able to afford the total cost of ownership to get it up and running then sustain it financially and technically.

Please note that none of the above is intended to be a criticism, it's only based on recent experience and the intent here is to be supportive. It's never easy to take something that is fantastically complex and reduce it to small bites for the masses.

Thanks for putting it out there, Michael!
 

[Michael McAndrew]

Hey Michael (this conversation might get a bit confusing for anyone not called Michael),

Thanks for your thoughts.  Improving how we organise the release cycle is definitely on the road map for this year.

resources, anything that can be done to reduce the price of entry in terms of both time and money (development labour costs) to make it easier to find the answers they need will be wonderful

Is there anything 'bite size' that you can identify that would help? If so, then I would encourage you to get stuck in and help out doing that