<aside> đź”— starmap.site

EngRes Team Roadmap Links (GitHub)

</aside>

<aside> ⚠️ Note: this document is still in draft form. If you have any questions, please reach out over slack #engres-milestone-tool

</aside>

What is the Starmap Roadmap Visualizer Tool?

The Starmap roadmap visualizer is a simple tool aimed at making a project’s roadmap easy to consume with a straight-forward visual representation. It reads roadmaps from GitHub issues that are using a few special encodings. It supports a simple, hierarchical data model which makes it easy to create custom views of parts of roadmaps, combined roadmaps, and nested work items.

See this part of 2022 Engres Summit presentation for additional context.

Why Build This?

We aim to make it possible for teams across the PLN to effectively share their roadmaps with the world. We care a lot about two big use cases:

  1. Sharing roadmaps between teams and organizations to coordinate/sequence big efforts
  2. Creating well-designed roadmap visualizations to embed in other places like slides and websites

But why not use an existing tool?

There are plenty of more sophisticated project management tools out there than this one. However,

  1. Sophisticated tools are hard to use right, and require a lot of centralization to coordinate use of effectively.
  2. We need to enable teams across the network to share roadmaps with each other in a common, decentralized way - a “protocol for roadmaps”
  3. Other tools are proprietary, meaning we’re locked in with a vendor and it’s an added cost to participate

How does it work?

The tool reads from issues in Github. The user guide is the authoritative reference on how the tool works. A few key concepts/features to call out:

  1. All roadmap data is kept in Github issues.
  2. Roadmaps are composed of milestones; each milestone is a Github issue. The root node “roadmap” is also a GitHub issue.