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OWD prioritization criteria

The OWD charter says "prioritize based on the needs of the global community of web developers and designers". This document describes criteria for open and sponsor/vendor-neutral prioritization and will further guide OWD’s decision-making.

Criteria

In no particular order. When deciding about what to prioritize and which opportunity to work on, OWD will take into account:

Effort

  • A higher cost ranks negatively
  • How much time needs to be spent?
  • How many pages to write?
  • How complex is the problem?
  • If new pages, how much maintenance will the pages require over time (e.g. how much in flux is the relevant technology space)?

Dependencies

  • More dependencies rank negatively
  • Does it need a change in the platform?
  • Does it need involvement from external people? (spec authors, spec tooling, etc.)

Community enablement

  • More enablement ranks positively
  • Is the work shareable?
  • Does the opportunity allow more contributors to join the project?
  • Does the opportunity allow contributors to be more effective?

Momentum

  • More momentum ranks positively
  • Are there enough implementations for a technology (and/or implementation interest)?
  • Is there a lot of community interest?
  • Has the specification stabilized? Is there no longer a risk that APIs will be renamed, redesigned etc.?

Enabling learners

  • Higher enablement ranks positively
  • Is the opportunity about concepts that need to be learned in order to understand the Web better? (as opposed to just another API reference, or some such thing)
  • Does the opportunity contribute an educational pathway for someone to understand a key web development-related topic?

Enabling professionals

  • Higher enablement ranks positively
  • MDN is known for being a reliable source of information for professionals.
  • Does the opportunity address needs of professional web developers and industry experts?
  • Does the opportunity close a gap to the competition? (other platforms, native developers, proprietary tech)

Underrepresented topics / ethical web

  • Higher under-representation ranks positively
  • Is the opportunity in the realm of accessibility, privacy, performance (on low-end devices), or other aspects of an ethical web?
  • Does the opportunity address the needs of an underrepresented market or geographical area?

Operational necessities

  • Higher ranking if the opportunity is identified as an absolute must-know
  • Example: All browsers unship AppCache. It is absolutely necessary for web developers to learn how to cache using Service Workers
  • Example: High severity security issues web developers need to be aware of

Addressing needs of the Web industry

  • Higher ranking if opportunity speaks to needs of the web industry
  • Does the opportunity address (or work towards easing) pain points mentioned in the MDN DNA and other important surveys/data points?
  • Is the opportunity mappable to data from surveys like State of CSS/JS etc.?
  • Is there evidence in data from sources like caniuse or MDN that people look for help on a particular topic?

Weighting

The above criteria are in no particular order. However, depending on the opportunity, certain criteria might be more important than others. For example, being data-driven is important, so if there is indication that an opportunity addresses a previously identified web developer pain point then that could mean a lot.

To that extent, the following criteria are usually weighted twice as much as others: