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Date:3 November 2021
Author:Jan Ainali

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End of year goals for the codebase stewards

As we just updated our roadmap the codebase stewards took this to heart and looked at what we need to do in a very short term to steer us on the right path. As we try to do our work in the open as much as possible and this is on a higher level than would fit in our weekly GitHub board we chose to publish this plan as blog post. We expect that many of these goals will turn into one or several GitHub issues in our repositories, but some might also be tracked in our Odoo instance. Below we have created goals for the section Tending to stewardship in the roadmap.

Activities & Processes

One year ambition Q4 2021 goal
Launch formal process stewardship practice
  1. Clean up our own documentation
  2. Have an outline of how a certification process could look like
    Help a codebase that is spun off from the host organization become its own external non-profit stewardship foundation  
    Include on our website a visual and short explanation of what we do
    1. Create a communication plan (including social media plan) about stewardship
    2. Create explainer on importance of international ambition for a codebase

    Codebases

    One year ambition Q4 2021 goal
    Determine how much capacity we want to invest in direct stewardship in 5 years Make a wishlist of types of codebases we desire for direct stewardship
    Develop pipeline for codebases to be stewarded by other organizations (work on documenting stewardship process above)
    Refine codebase routing/gating criteria for ongoing internal or external stewardship Document criteria we use to invest time in a codebase/community, check (and document) criteria we use to commit to steward a codebase and the citeria we use to exit our activities. Document any relationship to partner / member / funding opportunity
    Directly steward an international collaboration
    1. Suggest stewardship to OpenFisca
    2. Create prioritized shortlist of codebases with international potential that we would like to steward, including USA/CA codebases
    Positively impact the codebases under our stewardship Collect and list areas of impact per codebase (feed into storytelling plan)

    Community of practice

    One year ambition Q4 2021 goal
    Engage another organization in using and developing our materials and practices Engage associations of public organizations
    Organize a conference around a stewarded codebase community of practice Set a date and scope for the conference
    Get testimonials in our website (see positive impact on codebases, storytelling plan)
    Regular stewardship community meetup group Make a plan (including goals, audience and formats)
    Create modular content to more easily adapt to different personas Define the different personas we want to use
    Launch an online open source learning platform where we can host course material based on the stewardship framework Select platform and get it up and running, with the Standard for Public Code course from the City by City Academy platform ported to it
    Create guidance modules for codebase lifecycles, governance, and finance Table of Contents (and a shared understanding of the topic)