The Road Map to 2025

[palisadoes]

I need to add some context to the road map with some Palisadoes Foundation history.

When Talawa started with Calico it was just the API and mobile repos. The MERN stack and GraphQL was selected for the API as it was what was being taught at Jamaican universities as the newer technologies local companies wanted new hires to have. It was partly sponsor driven.

We converted to Typescript in a GSoC year for the strict typing.

We soon realized that having administrative functions in the mobile app was getting unmanageable. The screen sizes were too small to be useful. We removed them from that repo to create Talawa Admin using Typescript for consistency.

There have been frequent debates about the use of MongoDB. It’s not suitable for some of the tight relationships that organizations require. The manual tracking of the relationships creates bugs that RDBMS systems handle automatically. NoSQL is more suitable for social media posting and chats.

We have other issues too. The long list of deprecated and dormant packages we use needs to be trimmed. Viable alternatives need to be evaluated and implemented.

We have spent the last 6 months to try to get the basic features implemented. This year’s:

1. GSoC ideas were designed to create a range of features administrators and end users alike would desire.
2. Calico ideas are focused on stability and security features.

Assuming we can accomplish the GSoC and Calico features, what next? We are at a crossroads.

1. The core technology is the database(s) we use and it (they) must be the right choice for many years to come. We will need to address this in the next 12-24 months, or even sooner.
2. We need independence from deprecated packages. It makes no sense developing on such a fragile foundation. We have rightly defined this as a priority too.

The past year has seen a vast improvement in Talawa’s functionality. With the right planning between GSoC and Calico plus new and trusted contributors we can get this done by early 2025.

There have been many discussions about deep technical details. This one is for the general direction in the next 12 months.

[meetulr]

What's the expected release timeframe of the app?

[pranshugupta54]

Contributing to non-profit work feels really good because it helps society, even if indirectly 🚀.

Let's make independent threads for each topic

[pranshugupta54]

Production - Version 1

We should get the platform ready to launch its first version. We can only see if all our hard work pays off when real people start using it. They might want features we haven't even thought about, so putting it out there for them to try is important.

[pranshugupta54]

Can plan to add API and Admin Panel status page hosted independently to check uptime/downtime.
(- Suggested by Krishna on Slack)

[pranshugupta54]

Talawa website for showcase

As we get closer to production, we should also think about making a website to show off all the cool things Talawa can do, separate from the docs site.

[palisadoes]

We need to have a credible suite of apps by the end of the year. A few weeks in advance of us applying as a GSoC 2025 organization.

[pranshugupta54]

Features

We can increase more features in the system like -

[pranshugupta54]

Audit logging

This looks like a need for every Organization. We can plan a structure on adding a screen for this.