Our focus is to keep Gloss healthy, growing, and serving the people using it. To help us accomplish that, we’ve identified three areas where we should prioritize our efforts: Infrastructure; production; and documentation, education, and outreach. Although the specific tasks will come and go, the general categories of work will remain the same.
To that end, our roadmap focuses on higher-level objectives that will help us accomplish our goals.
With our proposal to create a dedicated design system team approved, the early part of 2019 we’ll focus some of our time recruiting and hiring a full-time front-end developer/engineer that will be 100% dedicated to Gloss. The proposal also adds two other 50% dedicated Gloss teams members (from within UXO), so we’ll also spend early 2019 developing a plan for how we’ll organize ourselves to get work done as a team.
In the spring we’re planning the first Gloss Community Workshop. This workshop will be a one-day event where developers and designers can learn about Gloss, contribute to Gloss, and meet other developers using Gloss. We’ll be focusing on creating a workshop format that we can use going forward as we establish a regular (at least one per semester) workshop schedule.
In addition to planning and having our first community workshop, we’ll be reworking the information architecture of the the main Gloss documentation site. As Gloss has grown, it’s become clear that there’s a need for larger, more complex design patterns in addition to the current lower level components. We’re already in the early stages of design and planning for this IA overhaul. In the second quarter, we’ll build and launch these updates.
By summer our goal is to have the Gloss team up to full speed. In between the spring and fall semesters, we’ll focus most of our efforts on production, including designing and building more complex patterns and templates.
As part of this production sprint, we’ll spend some time exploring what the future of Gloss might look like. For instance, how will Gloss and the IU Style Guide eventually merge together?
In the last quarter of 2019, we’ll hold another community workshop. In the early part of the fall, we’ll spend some time reflecting on what worked and what didn’t from our spring workshop, and we’ll make any needed adjustments to the workshop content.
Toward the end of 2019, we’ll have had almost a full year with a dedicated design system team and hopefully a bit more insight into what we might be able to achieve in 2020. We’ll spend time measuring what we’ve accomplished and evaluating what worked and what didn’t.