Vision for the first semester of 2016

[Twenty Two via Digitalmars-d-announce]

Parkinson's Law: work expands so as to fill the time available 
for its completion.

Having a set of vague tasks to finish within 6 months is great, 
but having a weekly more specific priority list to go along with 
it would be better. If, in addition, there was some 
accountability (not with negative implications, just a 
designation of responsibility) that would further narrow focus 
and ramp up productivity.

As a draft proposal, something like a weekly sticky TODO thread 
with clear goals could work. You'd list a few high priority items 
and ask for a volunteers for each and list them as they come in. 
You'd have bigger medium priority item list and ask for 
volunteers but only half of them need to be assigned to someone 
and completed. Then you'd have a much longer lower priority list 
that can be a bit more vague that people are encouraged to work 
on but that they don't need to volunteer for, just submit their 
pull requests (but they can flag an item and have it ticked off 
if they want). On top of that have a weekly pull request goal 
that updates daily (with a time stamp) and an overview of pull 
request numbers from previous weeks.

If an item isn't completed it gets rolled over to the next week 
with an asterisk (if it's medium or high priority) for each time 
it's been rolled over and the previous volunteer listed as such 
(and they can volunteer for the same item the next week giving 
them the perfect opportunity to say where they're at, what needs 
to be done, if the task should be broken down further, etc). 
It'll make it clear if whoever volunteered for a task needs some 
help or encouragement, or if certain high priority tasks need a 
volunteer or to be broken down into more manageable chunks even 
if someone drops off the face of the earth. With a one item at a 
time rule you're going to cut down on stagnation.

I'm sure there are lots of people who'd like to help out but 
they're not really sure what needs to be done or who else is 
doing it or if they'll step on toes, etc. Anyone wondering what's 
being worked on can take a look and help out themselves rather 
than getting upset in the forums about feature x never seeing the 
light of day. If they want feature x done they can take a look at 
the priority list and pick where it should go in the scheme of 
things, maybe even break it down - turn negative energy into 
productive energy :)