MoveOn Tech Roadmap March 2021

[schuyler1d]

This issue is meant to give an outline of MoveOn's intended internal investment in Spoke (besides community maintenance/management). Timelines and priorities may change based on internal or external opportunities/issues, however we think there's some value in communicating this to the community so volunteers and organizations know what parts we are focusing on.

Priorities from March 2021

• Message service extension-ification (support other services beyond Twilio)
• Anything necessasry/useful to support 10DLC changes
• Upgrade outdated libraries if possible
• Improve extensions system -- provide UI api to allow enabling/disablilng in org Settings
• Better campaign stats analytics/layout

Priorities from June 2020

• COMPLETED Extensibility: improving Message Handler hooks (and maybe Action Handlers)
• COMPLETED Dynamic Assignment 'Batches': moving to Elizabeth Warren's version of dynamic assignment allowing texters to release their assignments and only prompted for new ones when they are finished with replies of each 'batch'
• COMPLETED Phone number management: More extensibility along with implementations for automatically buying/releasing numbers
• MORE TO DO Better asynchronous job/task dispatching on AWS Lambda

Priorities from April 2020

• Texter User Experience: We're interested in improving the Texter UI/UX
  • This is nearing completion and can be tracked in the RFC and the PR
• Admin Campaign Reporting
• Number and Twilio Message service management -- buying, allocating (driven by @hiemanshu with ResistLabs and @matteosb )
• Other integration frameworks -- similar to contact loaders, we'd like to do the same for auth, incoming message handling, possibly assignments, and extending action handlers.
• Possibly updating dynamic assignment structure closer to Warren fork of Request/Release.

Priorities from November 2019

• We mark issues priority: 1 when MoveOn is prioritizing this issue
• COMPLETED: Scaling: We created an experimental scaling branch in 2018 which can greatly improve how well Spoke handles 100s of texters texting at once, requiring fewer server resources, allowing smaller orgs with less money to run larger campaigns.
  • COMPLETED: In the short term, the first focus is to merge in the schema changes required for this branch
• Error reporting: We want to better track and report on errors in sending to landlines, disconnected numbers, etc.
• COMPLETED: Better ingest (loading of contacts) architecture: Most campaigns have other data sources like CRMs, the VAN, etc. Currently the backend requires ad-hoc connections for each of those things and extensive changes across the codebase to add another source. We'd like an architecture where new ways of loading contacts can be more contained.
• Texter User Experience: We're interested in improving the Texter UI/UX

MoveOn currently intends to freeze its own codebase for the election mid-2020 ~ July/August.

While not focusing our own work on it, there are certain directions/improvements to the codebase that we're especially interested in:

• "Profanity filter" would help with a better texter experience
• Tagging on campaigns and/or messages can help with moderation and data exports
• Improving Twilio number buying -- either by building it into Spoke or otherwise.
• Improving Spoke startup experience -- making setup easier

[Frydafly]

Hey @schuyler1d! Checking in on this roadmap? Looks like a lot has been accomplished which is pretty great!

[crayolakat]

@Arique1104 @ibrand Do you think this issue should be closed since we have a new 2022 roadmap?