---
title: Roadmap
---

## Roadmap

### Motivation

This pattern shows how your group can define the scope of their project
and make a realistic plan to address it. This pattern provides the
backbone of our pattern language. It can be used to find a shared goal.

### Context

[Peeragogy](http://peeragogy.github.io/pattern-peeragogy.html) has
both distributed and centralized aspects. The discussants or
contributors who collaborate on a project have different points of
view and heterogeneous priorities, but they come together in
conversations and joint activities.

### Forces

>  **Variety**: people have different goals and interests in mind.
>  **Clarity**: some goals may be quite specific, and some rather vague.
>  **Coherence**: only some of these goals will be well-aligned.

### Problem

In order to collaborate, people need a way to share current, though
incomplete, understanding of the space they are working in, and to
nurture relationships with one another and the other elements of this
space. At the outset, there may not even be a coherent vision for a
project – but a only loose collection of motivations and sentiments.
Once the project is up and running, people are likely to pull in
different directions.

### Solution

Building a guide to the goals, activities, experiments and working
methods can help <span><span>Newcomers</span></span> and old-timers
alike understand their relationship with the project. It may combine
features of a manifesto, a syllabus, and an issue tracker. It may be a
design pattern or a pattern language <span
class="citation">\[3\]</span>. The distinguishing qualities of a project
Roadmap are that it should be adaptive to
circumstances, and that it should ultimately get us from *here* to
*there*. By this same token, any given version of the roadmap is seen as
fallible. In lieu of widespread participation, the project’s
<span><span>Wrapper</span></span> should attempt to synthesize an
accurate roadmap that is informed by participants’ behavior, and should
help moderate in case of conflict. Nevertheless, full consensus is not
necessary: different goals, with different *heres* and *theres*, can be
pursued separately, while maintaining communication.

### Rationale

The group evolves from a less-sophisticated to a more-sophisticated
manner of operating by using the roadmap. Using the roadmap builds a
collective awareness of how things are working in practice. In the
Peeragogy project our initial roadmap was a “crowdsourced” outline of
the first edition of the *Peeragogy Handbook*. Later, it took the form
of a schedule of meetings following a regular
<span><span>Heartbeat</span></span>, supplemented by a list of upcoming
deadlines. Most recently, our roadmap is expressed in the emergent
objectives collected at the end of current paper. We have seen that a
list of nice-to-have features created in a top-down fashion is
comparatively unlikely to go anywhere! A backlog of tasks and a
realistic plan for accomplishing them are vastly different things. An
adaptive roadmap is an antidote to <span><span>Tunnel
Vision</span></span> <span class="citation">\[1\]</span>.

### Resolution

An emergent roadmap is rooted in real problems and justifiable
solutions-in-progress in all their **variety** and communicates both
resolution and follow-through. The process of meshing varied issues with
one another requires thought and discussion, and this encourages
**clarity**. The test of **coherence** is that contributed goals and
ideas should be actionable. The ultimate quality-control test is if it
worked, i.e., did it come to pass that the task(s) the roadmap was
created to achieve ended up being achieved? If all of the issues that
the roadmap outlines are not resolved, the roadmap itself should be
revised. Without a roadmap, we would never know.

### Example 1

The *Help* link present on every Wikipedia page could be seen as a
localized <span><span>Roadmap</span></span> for individual user
engagement: it tells users what they can do with the site, and gives
instructions on how to do it.[^fn1]
someone who knows what they’re doing, there are around 30 pages listing
articles with various kinds of problems, for example articles tagged
with style issues, or “orphaned” articles (i.e., articles with no links
from other pages in the encyclopedia).[^fn2]^,[^fn3]^,[^fn4]
In 2010-2011, Wikimedia developed a strategic plan drawing
on community input <span class="citation">\[2\]</span>. In 2015, a
two-week Community Consultation was carried out; synthesis resulted in
“a direction that will guide the decisions for the organization.”[^fn5]
Community-organized WikiProjects often invite and guide involvement on
<span><span>A specific project</span></span>.

### Example 2

In a future university run in a peer produced manner, a fancy
President’s Residence presumably wouldn’t be needed. Leadership would be carried out in a more
collaborative and distributed fashion. However, depending on just how
distributed things are, it may turn out to be useful for project
facilitators to gather at a University Hall. Whereas there is strength
in numbers, there is leverage in organization. This is what the
<span><span>Roadmap</span></span> provides.

*President's Residence, University of Alabama.*

### What’s Next in the Peeragogy Project

If it becomes clear that something needs to change about the project,
that is a clue that we might need to revise our patterns or record a new
one. We can use the names of the patterns to tag our upcoming tasks.

### References

1. David M. Dikel, David Kane, and James R. Wilson. 2001. *Software architecture: Organizational principles and patterns*. Pearson Education.

2. Eugene Eric Kim and others. 2011. *Wikimedia Strategic Plan: A collaborative vision for the movement through 2015*. Wikimedia Foundation.

3. Christian Kohls. 2010. The structure of patterns. *Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs*, ACM, 12.

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[^fn1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents>

[^fn2]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_article_cleanup>

[^fn3]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_articles_with_style_issues>

[^fn4]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:All_orphaned_articles>

[^fn5]: <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/23/strategy-consultation/>

[^fn6]: <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/08/27/strategy-potential-mobile-multimedia-translation/>