Kotahi is a community project so it’s crucial that we collaborate on the roadmap so that the platform is developed in a direction that benefits the entire community. When community proposals are ahead of the development team, it can actually accelerate the feature development and delivery process, as there will be less need for large-scale refactors, opportunity for cross-organisational collaboration of specific features, and a reduced likelihood of duplicate efforts. This article outlines how we collaborate on feature proposals to ensure that all parties involved have an opportunity to share their input before key features are developed.
1. Get familiar with the Roadmap
The Coko team maintains a public roadmap for Kotahi in Miro. This roadmap aims to provide a high-level overview of Kotahi’s direction. Please check it out before opening any feature proposals in this forum. You are welcome to comment on the roadmap to show your support or ask questions about the planned development.
2. Share your ideas for Kotahi’s roadmap
If you have a use case that isn’t included on our roadmap or discussed in the topics this forum, please share your ideas by opening a feature proposal in this forum. When you start a topic in the Feature Proposal Category, you’ll see a template to help you to provide the necessary information.
3. Coko team and community feedback on new proposals
The Coko team will respond to your proposal as soon as possible to discuss the idea and ask clarifying questions with the aim to make the use case understandable to the Kotahi community. Following this, we’ll announce the feature proposal in the Kotahi newsletter and other channels, inviting other community members to give comments.
4. Accepting proposals to the Roadmap
The Coko team will accept the proposal to the roadmap and announce this to the Kotahi community. At this stage, we’ll create an issue in the Gitlab repository (where the development is managed), and link it to the topic in this forum so that users can keep up-to-date on its progress. Any further discussion on the proposal will happen in Gitlab.
5. Community development collaboration
If the proposal also includes development effort support, the following process in Gitlab applies:
- The Kotahi lead developer provides implementation guidance in the Gitlab issue
- The community developer opens a branch for the feature
- The community developer should push local work to this branch regularly to avoid lost work.
- When the feature is ready for review the community developer opens an MR and assigned the Kotahi lead developer
- The Kotahi team (Lead Developer, QA Engineer and Project Manager) review the code and functionality.
- The Kotahi lead developer may request changes for the community developer to implement.
- The lead developer merges the code
- The feature is released and announced to the community.