2022 is already here: time flies in this pandemic period (or has it always been like this ?!).
The 2022 OCA board members wish a happy new year to the OCA Community: more wonderful OCA modules with good functional documentation, a new infrastructure thanks to the new poetic concept of “runboat”, a lot of friendly PR reviews, (new) active maintainers, (new) happy members and sponsors!
New year, New board
After our Annual General Assembly in 2021, a new board has been elected: Benoit Guillot, Daniel Reis, Enric Tobella, Frederik Kramer, Graeme Gellatly, Joël Grand-Guillaume, Simone Orsi, Stéphane Bidoul and Virginie Dewulf will form the board for 2022. Alexandre Fayolle leaves the board but will remain active on the OCA infrastructure, of course. Thanks again for your energy and time in 2021, Alexandre!
New year, New strategy
The first OCA board meeting took place on 12th January.
We ended up with 4 priorities for this year after a “temperature check” (everyone votes with their hand: up, middle, down in order to give a general idea of the enthusiasm for the proposal):
Communication: people need to better understand the value we offer
Happy users, members & contributors: we should embrace new contributors and give them an amazing experience with us
Strengthen our support to OpenUpgrade
Improve the OCA infrastructure resilience
We then moved on to what we called “the major projects”: everyone added ideas in our shared document and wrote down a corresponding deliverable (what will it look like when the major project is completed).
After that, we prioritised them and discussed if these projects were really related to the priorities.
Some of them are tricky: we wrote them down, but are they really aligned with our 4 priorities? For example:
• OCA App store: why do we want this? It is to get more users? Actually we have a lot of users and we lack maintainers at the moment.
• OCA distribution: same question. Why this? Is it to get recurrent revenues for the OCA?
These 2 projects have been kept at the bottom of the list. The Board will keep an eye on these for the following years but won’t dedicate a lot of energy to them in 2022.
Joël added another major project: Value proposition and revenue model of OCA for the following 5-10 years. The context of OCA creation from when it was formed has changed. At first it was to solve the quality issues in the community, and to provide a strong and coordinated voice to Odoo. Now Joël feels that OCA is more about adding advanced features to run more complex projects. Graeme proposed to keep this important topic on hold till 2022 OCA Days where we can include our members in the discussion.
Each major project was rephrased with key results, we almost ran out of time to assign people on the “must have” priorities. Yet we managed to do it :)
2022 Major Projects and Working Groups
Here is the result. Bold means that we must do them in 2022. For each project, a driver has been assigned plus other people from the board (and non-board members are more than welcome, see below).
- 0) OCA Days 2022 takes places remotely or physically (all of the board for 8 weeks, driver Rebecca Gellatly)Wait, we have a “0” project? Yes, OCA Days will take place and it’s of upper importance, even if it's not directly linked to our 4 priorities. Plus, we are geeks, let’s accept it: we count from 0, hell yeah!
- 1.1) Implement the communication strategy plan in 2022 (Frederik, Graeme, Joël, Rebecca, driver Virginie Dewulf)Here the objectives need to be decided by the working group based on the communication strategy built in 2021.
- 1.2) Rebuild OCA website in 2022 (Simone, driver Graeme Gellatly)GoodSense provided us with mock ups and a new structure for our website.
2.1) Provide more autonomy to Maintainer in 2022 (Stéphane, Enric, driver Benoît Guillot)
2.2) Improve the contributor Onboarding journey with OCA (Benoit, Virginie, driver Daniel Reis)
2.3) Pull request / review / issue management
- 3.1) Strengthen our support on OpenUpgrade (driver Frederik Kramer)This one was a difficult one: it seems that our OCA Odoo instance is not the perfect database to be able to build migration scripts (for example, we don’t use stock). We might then support Open Upgrade in a different way this year.
4.1) Infrastructure: improve bus factor by the end of 2022 (Simone, Alexandre F., Benoit, driver Stéphane Bidoul)
Some of the initiatives did not make it to the top priority list. They are still things we think need to be worked on, and kept them on our list, in case we find a way to work on them:
5) OCA Apps store
6) OCA Distributions
Let’s get started
Each working group will create a decision document stating:
Driving circumstances (what we are solving)
Goals (what the end result should look like)
Proposed key result indicators
Comparison between the several options considered (pros and cons for each)
Proposed option
Other options evaluated
The monthly board meetings will now last 1h30 instead of 2 hours. The working groups have to lead their projects in parallel and report during the board meetings.
We need more brains
No, the board members did not transform into zombies during the new year holidays, don’t worry.
We have a lot of things to do to make these plans come alive. It would be great to get at least one non-board member to join these working groups.
Do you feel like you could contribute your time and ideas to these topics? Please, contact the “driver” of the working group where you’d like to apply or send an email to Rebecca and she will put you in touch with the right people.
We can’t wait to get you onboard! It is going to be a great year!
Cover Photo by Artturi Jalli on Unsplash
