Dev Diary #17: Rewriting the Roadmap
Hello everyone! Welcome to a new Dev Diary! Today we are going to talk about our (outdated) roadmap! Those who have been following the development of Atlantic Forum closely, will know our roadmap, which can be found here. They will also likely know that the roadmap is quite outdated, and that as we are closing in on phase 2 we have nearly achieved all of our milestones!
Yesterday the two members of the steering comittee and the three staffers had their first joint conference call. An amazing feat on its own, as according to the roadmap recruitment of the steering comittee and staffer would occur in phase 2 and phase 3. Yet here we were with 5 people together at the end of phase 1!
The original phase 1 was only about setting up and automating this platform, and gathering the patrons needed to fund building the platform. The platform's patron registration is now fully automated. When becoming a patron you will be redirected to a payment client, and upon succesful registration an automated email will be send to you allowing you to create an account and access https://atlantic-forum.com/my-patronage. While we do not yet have the number of patrons needed to cover the costs, a tax break and increased funding from our sponsors (NATO PDD and Pantheon) allow us to move into phase 2 comfortably.
But what is left of phase 2 (and 3 for that matter?) we have checked of nearly all the points and even did more! The magazine Atlantica and the Transatlantic Incubator were both launched in July. The first articles of Atlantica were published on September 1, 4 months before the envisioned date, and the incubator currently has four projects under its wing that are being developed:
- The #PastGen- #FutureGen project following ACTs Human Capital Agenda;
- The Centre of Excellence Engagement program;
- A highschool program under the Academy, and;
- A young journalist program;
The Highschool program also led us to launching the Academy earlier, and last week we announced our partnership with the Clingendael Institute to train our trainers. (Check out the call for trainers here!). Incubation projects and the launch of the Academy were only envisioned for the 4th of April 2020!
In the coming weeks we will rewrite the Roadmap as we move to the launch of phase 2, which is currently scheduled to happen on the 4th of October, celebrating both 6 months of Atlantic Forum and marking the midterm of the NATO at 70 celebrations. What is left to do then? The new phase 2 and phase 3 will focus on achieving our milestone of a 1000 patrons, we have a couple of recruitment drive projects lined up. One of them is the launch of Y-TLN pilots. Y-TLN was originally set to launch on the 4th of April 2020, but will now be trialed (and errored) in the 6th months leading up to our 1 year anniversary. More about the Y-TLN pilot in the dev diaries later this month.
The other area of focus will be on the four projects currently in the incubator, with the High School program taking the lead, more about these projects later as well.
Finally, as the amount of patrons grow, we will also expand our staff to 10 people, with the initial focus on a High School Program Director and filling up the three spots in the steering comittee.