Project Meeting 2023.02.23 - ActivitySim/activitysim GitHub Wiki

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?