Project Meeting 2023.02.23

Agenda

• Initial Roadmap Discussion (presented by Dave Ory, WSP)

Action Items / Next Steps

• For next week's Thursday presentation
  • Draft table of contents / annotated outline
  • Develop list of initial interviewees and topics of interest for the interviews
  • Get green light to start initial interviews

Meeting Notes

Presentation: roadmap-feb-2023.pdf

• Scope of Work for WSP on Roadmap Development

  • Develop a multi-year roadmap for ActivitySim 2.0 (short-, medium-, and long-term guidance)
  • Conduct surveys and interviews
  • Identify needs, constraints, timing
  • Deliverables
    • Core model system performance and usability requirements, component modularity and testing
    • Proposed designs for example model systems
    • Compatibility
    • Documentation requirements
    • Approaches for regularly maintaining and updating the roadmap

• Overall plan for roadmap development

  • Ask what are we trying to achieve
  • Identify the things that we can do
  • Decide how to organize ourselves
  • Establish vision (independent of financial constraints)
  • Create financially constrained workplan to achieve visions

• Proposed Roadmap Outline

  • Establish context
    • Background narrative
    • Learning from customer interviews
  • Set direction
    • Objectives (from understanding what the consortium and the product are trying to achieve)
    • Management Plan
    • Vision
  • Measure progress (for the consortium and for the product)
    • Key Results
    • Product Roadmap

• Proposed Interview Approach

  • Initial open-ended interviews of consortium members (4-6)
    • Talk to engineers previously involved in development
    • Users that are not paying into the consortium
  • Later interviews may be different from these initial ones, may circle back with the initial interviewees
    • Topics of interest focus on performance, usability, features
    • Could be broader set of topics
      • Explore project management (beyond product management) such as decision-making processes
    • Propose to include non-consortium ActivitySim users

• Proposed Check-in Schedule

  • February/March: Roadmap outline and interview approach
  • April: Key learnings from interviews (to date)
  • May: Draft objectives and vision
  • June: Draft key results and product roadmap
  • July: Draft roadmap document

• Proposed by consortium members to be addressed in the roadmap development activities

  • Prepare a list of questions that we expect the roadmap to answer and turn those into objectives. For example:
    • What examples should we be maintaining? is a question to be answered in the roadmap.
    • It can be identified that we are managing a long list of example, establish that this is inefficient and unstainable.
    • An example objective could be something like wanting to efficiently manage resources by limiting examples to maintain.
    • Propose a path forward, technically, that addresses this objective.
    • Roadmap could identify a broad range of potential solutions/paths forward but address why some directions are not feasible.
  • Inventory of users and product usage
    • Limit to ActivitySim or broaden to other tools (such as PopulationSim)
    • How are people executing ActivitySim, i.e. GUIs (inventory different implementations)
  • SWOT analysis
  • "Donor model" concept
  • Colleen Pulawski of the Beeck Center at Georgetown has a report ready to share on open-source tools, for which ActivitySim was a case study. The report is a little narrowly focused on governance, and the roadmap needs to address more things, but it could be helpful. ACTION ITEM: Joe to get permission to share the report and invite Colleen to present findings to the consortium.
  • Explore how broadly or narrowly we want to define the core/products and scope of the consortium. What are the boundaries now and do we want to contract or expand those boundaries?