DDEV 2023 Vision

Background

• I (Randy) am completely happy with my role, my work, and supporting this community, and expect to do it indefinitely.
• We are all finite, so the project needs more than just me.
• There are plenty of things I’m not getting done, including fundraising, finding new volunteers, website maintenance, etc.
• I'd like to find stakeholders who can act a bit like managers for accountability.

What do we want to do?

• Provide outstanding and well-maintained and supported local development capabilities for web developers.
• Cultivate a healthy community that supports itself and contributes to the project.
• Build a sustainable project that is not dependent on one person.

Areas To Work On

• Another maintainer
• Project management and Product management: (Accountability)
• Funding development.
• Website redesign and maintenance, including docs, blog, and ddev.com
• Documentation maintenance and improvement.
• “DDEV Foundation” - Rename, get 501(c)(3)

​

More Maintainers

As I worked on the issues we've talked about concerning "Bus factor" I found that just documenting techniques and sharing secrets was nowhere near enough. Somebody needs to be experienced at *doing* all the things.

​

Project Accountability

In a fancier organization we'd have project managers and product managers, but perhaps in this size org we just need a bit more formal accountability. How can we accomplish that?

​

Funding Development

In a normal nonprofit, "funding development" is just referred to as "development", but means making those enterprise calls, asking agencies and hosting companies to pony up and offering things like dedicated support, etc. But it probably requires somebody with the skill and focus to do it.

​

Web Presence Upgrade

Matt Stein finally explained to me why our web presence, design, appearance are important. People go looking for a tool, and their first impression counts hugely. Currently we're largely unmaintained and uncoordinated.

• Docs
• Blogs and related
• Ddev.com in general

​

Documentation

Matt has been working on a master plan to upgrade the docs and has done wonderfully, but there's a long ways to go.

​

The docs have traditionally been "good enough" and great effort has gone into correctness and completeness, but there's a lot more to docs than that.

​

Localdev Foundation -> DDEV Foundation

The entity that handles funds was created as "Localdev Foundation" because of uncertainty about the name "DDEV", but can now be renamed. Fred Plais, president of Platform.sh, has renaming to "DDEV Foundation".

​

Getting US 501(c)(3) nonprofit status for the entity would help us in some areas. It's a lot of work, but it can be done.

Immediate Plans

• Move GitHub org from drud to ddev (issue)
• Ddev-get add-on improvements (versioning, notification, deletion, listing)
• Support for early setup in web container startup (hooks in start.sh), possibly idea of "build" stage.
• Telemetry/instrumentation directly to Amplitude instead of via Segment.io
• Consider making traefik the default router, while retaining ability to use traditional router

What Did We Miss?