by Mitchell Cuevas on July 14, 2022

One of the most wonderful things about working in a decentralized ecosystem like Stacks is the rich variety of contributors, experts, and builders that play major roles in the network’s progression. This also comes with its challenges, though, as many separate companies with different goals and communication preferences can make it hard for those that aren’t in all the Discords and meetings to keep up with everything that has shipped or what’s coming next.

Audience and stakeholders of all different types need to know where the network is headed, so we set out to create one place where roadmap-related content can be collected and displayed. At a glance, you should be able to tell what major improvements are coming up as well as get a sense for smaller tooling, team, or other more specific updates.

At the Stacks Foundation, we’ve taken the initial lead in putting this page together, but the roadmap needs to be a reflection of the entire community’s efforts. As such, keeping up this roadmap will be a community-wide effort and we thank you for your help in advance! On our end, we’ve trained moderators on the type of content to look out for, have automation running to collect posts from regular contributors, and the site allows for submissions so you and others can add relevant additional links.

TL;DR:
The top section = big picture direction stuff for the network
The bottom section = day to day updates and granular progress

If you open the page, you’ll first see some very high-level updates from past to present (left to right), with the biggest network/protocol related items shown off. You can click into several key resources for each - this first section will stick to highlighting just those updates that will affect the entire network or are critically important. At times this section may include important SIPs, upcoming votes, proposed hard forks, major version updates, and so on.

Next, you’ll see a simple feed that houses numerous other Stacks-related updates. This section covers new integrations on the network, updates to key developer tooling, major team launches, bigger news related to the token, and so forth. You can think of them as second order roadmap items that are more specific to certain areas of the network.

Links of all kinds are welcome
In an ideal world, everyone working on Stacks would submit information to a roadmap in a structured way at regular intervals. With likely a hundred or more teams working on Stacks, grantees, Residents, and stalwarts like Hiro, Daemon, and others all contributing on projects big and small, this just isn’t realistic. Updates come in the form of tweets at times, blog posts at others, forum posts, Github gists, and so on. The roadmap page allows us to clip any link, including tweets to feature in the feed of roadmap related items.

Now that there’s a place for everyone to find it, we hope all of you amazing contributors will help us maintain it and keep the community and broader public in the know about what you’re doing. Hiro sets a great example by publishing monthly recaps and follows our model of sharing priorities for the upcoming quarter. You don’t have to be that formal about it, but we’d love for you to start by using the submission link to suggest roadmap items.

Dedicated sections for stalwarts and key infrastructure, up next
We have plans to add a third section to this page that surfaces links to more permanent roadmaps (or similar content feeds) that key contributors maintain. Organizations like Hiro, Daemon, or the Stacks Foundation have ongoing work queues that likely fit this description, so we’ll be exploring how to pull in things like grants about to launch, major releases to the Hiro wallet, new miner tools from Daemon, and so on. For now, you’ll see this material in the feed, but we’ll be active in exploring how we get better at nearly surfacing the most relevant updates.

Who decides the big picture roadmap anyway?
The short answer: You.

Nothing happens on this network without buy-in from the community. I encourage anyone with ideas, feedback, or general thoughts on where the network should go in the future to join key calls related to the blockchain found here. The other way to get involved is via the forum and SIPs to start conversations and gather feedback. Good ideas turn into SIPS, turn into roadmap items, turn into a better Stacks network.

Try it out! Jump to the roadmap page and see if you have thoughts on any of the key upcoming upgrades and work.