This page was last updated 7th September, 2024.

Our current milestone: a Safe & Active Community (Q3 2024)

We are currently (Q3 2024, July to September) focussing on building around the goal of a Safe & Active community.

This milestone will include efforts such as:

• rebuilding the map search to filter and sort members better, better highlight active members, and show more information on the map,
• building a system of "activeness probes" to keep track of who is still interested in hosting Couchers (eg. allowing inactive users to be "filtered out"),,
• rolling out the first version of Strong Verification to help build safety and trust on the platform,
• limiting sending requests and some other features to only those with completed profiles to reduce empty profiles and low-quality requests,
• completing the work on push notifications and the new notification system, and
• migrating the old handbook to the new help center to make information more easily accessible.

Detailed roadmap of current development work

You can find out up-to-date and in-depth information about what we are currently working on on our Development Roadmap view on Github which we update regularly as we plan our day-to-day development work. Note that some of the information there may be highly technical in nature and not be accessible to all audiences; and dates or timelines listed there are by no means guaranteed and are only an indication. Please keep in mind that Couchers is a volunteer project built, maintained, and operated entirely by volunteers in their free time!

How we structure our strategic and development goals and roadmap

We currently build around a quarter-based system of strategic milestones. We divide the year into calendar quarters, Q1 (Jan to Mar) to Q4 (Oct to Dec) and choose a strategic and development focus that we call a milestone for each quarter. This helps the various teams at Couchers to rally behind a common goal and have clarity on what they should be working on together. Each strategic milestone is brainstormed and chosen by the Board of Directors along with the volunteer team using input from the community.