Cross-post from https://association.drupal.org/node/18358

Greetings from the Drupal.org Software Working Group! We are a governance group that has been chartered in order to define the overall strategy and roadmap for *.Drupal.org's features and functionality.

The Drupal Association Board is having their quarterly retreat at DrupalCon Prague in just a few short weeks, at which point they'll be reviewing draft 2014 budget for the year, which will include an amount set aside for Drupal.org improvements. We want to ensure that the community has input on what this budget is spent on, but unfortunately the previous data we have on what the community wants is almost two years old. And, because of the tight timeline, we need to do this quickly.

Therefore, the Drupal.org Software Working Group is seeking input from the community to help us determine two to three significant improvements for Drupal.org to be started on by Drupal Association staff at the beginning of 2014 (yes, Drupal.org D7 upgrade will be finished this year!). If you'd like to provide your input on the Drupal.org roadmap for the first part of 2014, please visit the 2014 Drupal.org feature brainstorming group. You can review and "vote up" other peoples' proposals, or propose your own ideas. We'll be leaving the call for ideas open until 00:00 GMT on September 2, 2013.

We will then look at the results gathered, consider our constraints (budget, development, other necessary maintenance work, volunteer momentum) and make the best possible choice we can for the next projects. At this time, we are likely to avoid any projects that would block the forward movement of others. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include them. Please do. Just know that we have some work to do before the next epic undertaking. Also note that these votes will almost certainly not correspond directly to the initial priorities that we publish. There will be very practical reasons why some of the top-ranked ideas won’t be a part of this batch. We will explain the reasoning behind our choices, but we probably won’t be able to explain the reasoning for every choice we do NOT make.

We acknowledge this interim process to be severely sub-optimal. The timeline is too short, the tools are awkward, we won't get enough feedback from a broad enough representation of the community, and we acknowledge that different stakeholders will have equally important, competing, or even conflicting priorities. One of our highest priorities as a Working Group is to develop efficient and inclusive process for collecting, prioritizing, and implementing Drupal.org improvements, a process which will allow us to get the widest community feedback possible and make informed decisions. That takes time, however, and we cannot afford to put improvements on hold until it’s worked out.

We will be re-engaging the community in 2014 with more robust process to gather more ideas about how Drupal.org can better serve its varied audiences. We’d love to have you think hard about small-scope ideas with wide-ranging impact in this go-round, but we also want to know the truth about where it hurts.

Express the needs, risks, and benefits of your ideas as clearly as you can, we’ll look at the entire picture to figure the best way we can move forward, and we'll share the results with you in a few weeks.

Thank you for your participation in making Drupal.org awesome!

Drupal.org Software Working Group

Drupal version: Drupal 7.x