5.0 and or 4.8 (was Re: [development] Drupal x.x.0 freeze date)

[Jenny Hsueh]

One suggestion, I think what people are looking for in a roadmap is 
really a better view of what's going on and the opportunities to engage 
earlier  than one could gathered from the current drupal site .  So,  
instead of making this "roadmap" an artificial thing  can we  
leverage/enhance the data that may  already exist  and  make them more 
consumable to folks?

I assume each feature has a "project" some where on the drupal site, but

-- it lacks the information of its dependencies
-- it lacks the information whether it will be included, dropped or 
committed for upgrades to the next release
-- new projects are invisible to the outside world until bulk of the 
development has done.

I will think a roadmap can simply be a report that is built out from 
those information.  For example, the developers can first have a ticker 
on their project whether they want it to be in the next release or 18 
months from now, and what new features/upgrades will be, the project 
leads can first run the report and perform some sanity check to see if 
they are reasonable.

This should give the developers/project leads a good feel of the efforts 
and coordinations required, also to the end users:  what's new,  what's 
going to be updated etc to derive "what's the impact to me".   A tally 
of the project activities can provide some indications  on how active a 
project is, a voting to the project will also be nice to get user feedback.

I like the proposal of personal battle plan, this will work well with 
the reporting system if parts of the information can be 
structured/categorized that go along with each person's project.

Jenny