We should add everything to a category and have work in progress template instead. This dramatically increases maintainability, if a document is in draft status and got no edits for like a years, it's pretty safe to delete, while just having uncategorized pages flying around will lead to a similar mess as in the old wiki.

Goob, your page is already in a nice shape. Of course you can keep the draft-status for one more week or so, but don't wait too long to publish it. Well, it's a wiki-page, and everyone who has used wikipedia only once knows that there might be quite unfinished pages, that the members are still working on. I'd say, give it some days and on the weekend we should publish it as a work in progress template.

I don't envisage it staying as a wiki page - I only put it on the wiki so other people could easily edit it before publication. I think it would work better on the blog, perhaps as three separate posts for length reasons. I intend to delete it from the wiki once others have had chance to read and correct/improve it.

Let's say 30 June for a deadline to correct and improve it, and I'll then remove it and hopefully it can be published on the blog. That should give enough time for everyone to have a look and make improvements.

@goob blogposts become quickly expired. This should be maybe in the diasporafoundation website, but the wiki is a good place to put it.

Thanks to Rasmus for his edits.

I'd be really grateful if others would look it over and correct my errors. It would be really helpful if we have something we can communicate about likely future development (including things which won't be developed) as the same questions are coming up time and again. Thanks in advance.

I'm not a native speaker so I won't say anything about the form. I will do some modification about the links on each topic ("If you think you can help us with this, please go here (link)." is pretty useless imo, a link to loomio / github could be better, but I'm not sure if this is the place to do it, or if we should do that on the todo page).

Anyway, this page is going to evolute with the time and I don't think this should be a blog article. A wiki page is perfect from my point of view, and we can share this link without any problem.

@seantilleycommunit , I've just noticed that you have made some comments in the discussion page for this wiki article. I hope you don't mind if I copy them here, so that I can discuss them here.

I feel that while we have established consensus on many of these features, they are not currently part of an officially sanctioned community "plan". I think that we need to do several things for a proper roadmap:

1. Break things down into bite-size bits. It's one things to say that refactoring federation is a single thing we want to do, but it's a monumental task. What kinds of small steps would need to be taken to get to the bigger ones?

2. We cannot make gigantic promises for features if we don't have developers to code them. I believe our roadmap should be shaped by the tasks our volunteers want to work on, and in accordance with point one, we ought to think about scaling things down. Solve the smaller problems first, in order to solve bigger problems.

I'm also not entirely sure this should in-and-of-itself be a blogpost, but rather a proper coordinated roadmap. I think a much more sane starting point for a future roadmap could be put together based on TODO-list.

Thanks for your comments. I agree there is a need and a place for a roadmap. However I think there is a need for a roadmap and for an article such as this. I think you may have misunderstood the purpose of my article. The whole point of this article is to communicate with the wider Diaspora community (and with potential users) in clear, easy-to-understand terms about how development has been progressing and is likely to progress.

A road map is useful for the developers themselves, and those managing development, to ensure that priority is given to the most important tasks so that development progresses in the right direction. This is important.

However what I'm trying to do is to improve communication with non-developers who use Diaspora, particularly those who (frequently) post things such as 'Two years later and still no photo albums/groups/chat/etc etc etc? This is rubbish!' - which I see often.

Basically, the majority of community members appear to have no idea about the direction of development. What I'm attempting to do is to reach out to them (i.e. 'outreach', which has been made one of the key tasks) to explain why it is that their favourite feature has not yet appeared in Diaspora, and might not for a long time yet. I'm trying to give people a better understanding of what is going on behind the scenes, so that they can be happier using Diaspora knowing that people are working hard to improve it, that they are not being ignored by 'Diaspora Central' but that there are many hurdles and obstacles in the way which make development a slow process, especially that fundamental things need to be made stable before it's right to create lots of 'window-dressing' features of the sort which people repeatedly cry out for.

I've been careful not to make any promises in this article; in most cases I'm pouring cold water on people's hopes for lots of features to be added any time soon, explaining why things take a long time. (If you find any promises in there, please point them out to me so I can edit the text.)

Yes, there is a need for a road map to help people manage the development process more effectively and more strategically, but this is a separate and completely different, and I would say, equally important, piece of communication with Diaspora's wider community, who by and large have little or no idea of what is going on 'behind the scenes'.

Fla and others, thanks for your input. I don't need help with the form so much as checking any statements I have made in the article about technical matters to make sure that I have not said anything incorrect, and correcting technical details where necessary, as Rasmus has done for one issue.

Thanks in advance.

The todo list page => what
A roadmap => when
This "article" => why

It's as simple as that.

@goob I don't think we need to publish your work on a blog, a wiki page is perfect imo because it can be update easily. So I just think we should finish polish it and post with DiasporaHQ "all the things you'd like to know about the diaspora development and you never found an answer" and the link to the wiki.

I'd really love to see @florianstaudacher and @jonnehass edit this wiki page because there is things to say and to add, and they are the best placed to do it.

Thanks, @flaburgan . I don't mind where it's published - a blog was my first thought. All it needs is technical checking and correction by people who understand the technical issues far better than I do. If Jonne and Florian can find time to look at it, that would be great, but I understand that they already do an enormous amount of work on the project, so if anyone else could help out, that would be great.

We do as a project need to do more to communicate with the wider community, and with people who don't currently use Diaspora, to 'demystify' the project and its development. This article is an attempt to be a part of that process.