Having a public and up-to-date roadmap for an open source project can encourage new contributors to join a project, guide the efforts of existing contributors, and give confidence to adopters about the direction and sustainability of the project.

However for a roadmap to work you need commitment from its participants. In a company, management can commit to a product roadmaps top-down but you can't do that in an open source project with various organizations contributing. Nick and Thomas are working on a solution in two of their open source projects (ClearlyDefined & OSS Review Toolkit) to try to solve this commitment challenge.

Multiple organizations and individuals are working together in the ClearlyDefined and ORT, the call for a public roadmap became stronger. For example, people want to know when improvement requests relevant to their organization will be implemented. Whether something gets implemented and when, depends on the priorities of the people making and reviewing the contributions. In most open source projects small requests can often be quickly addressed but bigger changes usually require a commitment from people’s employers. This was where ClearlyDefined and ORT - like other open source projects - ran into a demand and supply mismatch: each organization has their own wishes, priorities and resources towards the projects, but every big change requires the involvement of the project maintainers who are either volunteering their time or need to get time from their organization to be involved.

In this session Nick and Thomas will present an innovative governance and funding model created by the ORT community to align demand and supply between organizations so they can agree to implement items together resulting in a roadmap with committed delivery items.