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Roadmap for the USEITI website

This wiki is home to planning and roadmap documents for the USEITI website. This website team follows user-centered development practices as best it can. As such, it follows a hypothesis-driven design and development cycle.

Why is this important?

When we set out to build something (in this case, a website), we have a vision for what we need, but we also know that we need to actively learn from the people who need the solution as we are creating it. To build a solution that works, we must acknowledge that we don't really know what it will look like in the end. The most important thing, then, is to articulate what we think we know, build a little thing to validate those assumptions. Maybe the results of this test show that we need to change our approach a little (or a lot). Maybe the results show we were right on target and we can move forward confidently.

Either way, by building these small learnings along the way to a final product, we've replaced our massive risk (ie, building the entire project and finding out at the end that we got it wrong) with many smaller risks, ever-adjusting towards our goal outcomes along the way.

And note that we are driving towards outcomes, not things. For example, an outcome might be "We want to increase the number of visitors to XYZ Science Center." We might have been hired to create a website to do this, but through the course of our building and testing find out that the most effective way to meet this outcome is not to build a website at all, but to hire a communications manager who can run social media campaigns. Did we "deliver a website?" No, not at all. By that measure we "failed." However, through iterative, learning-based development, we accomplished the more important goal: delivering on a desired outcome.

USEITI Project Roadmap

• Problem Statement
• Project Hypotheses

Current Sprint

We are working on the following hypotheses in the current sprint:

We believe that: providing more location-based information
Will: meet a user need for the concerned citizen who wants to know what’s 
happening in his/her neighborhood
We will know we are right when we see increased interest from non-sector-specific 
civil society groups (local groups instead) pending more comms outreach

We believe that: providing more explanation of the government 
structure in natural resource revenues
Will result in: more clarity around who-does-what, and provide a 
resource for people to find the right office for their needs
We will know we are right when: ONRR sees a decrease in misdirected 
requests for information

You can track our progress this sprint here.

Previous Sprints

We archive learnings from sprints under Learnings.

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Participating in USEITI development

You can add a new issue to bring a bug or suggestion to the attention of the development team. Issues should be logged as per the following:

• Bugs: coded elements do not function as required
• Enhancements: product backlog elements, ideas for functionality or improvements
• Design: questions about design alternatives and threads to build consensus on design directions
• Question: general catch-all for questions

You can also email the team at useiti@ois.doi.gov.