CodeNOW NYC — Roadmap
Living roadmap for the CodeNOW NYC program. This file is rendered live at /roadmap on every merge to main.
1. Vision
CodeNOW NYC connects city agencies, nonprofits, and community organizations with volunteer developers to build public-good technology — on the same governed CodeNOW platform that regulated enterprises ship on, free for civic NYC, running on community-owned hardware.
Problem we solve: civic tech projects lack inclusive governance, structured phase workflows, real-time collaboration tools, clear role definitions, and traceable decisions. The program integrates all five — and proves the delivery claim with live platform metrics.
2. The Two Products
| Product | What it is | Where |
|---|---|---|
| The Starting Line | The civic on-ramp: plan your project, gather your people, and graduate to a governed build — no platform expertise required | /starting-line |
| CodeNOW Platform | Governed delivery for civic NYC: environments, deploys, observability, identity, and secrets managed by the platform | /platform |
The program runs as two applications:
- This website (
codenow-nyc-web) — the public marketing + status site: the two product stories, help center, public projects listing, this roadmap, and the live /status metrics surface. - The planning app (
codenow-nyc-planning) — the authenticated product: accounts, organizations, the four-phase project lifecycle (ideation → planning → governance → handoff), NYC-Council-style voting, and admin. Sign-in and registration live there; this site routes you across.
3. What's Live Today
- Full public marketing surface: home, about, platform, starting-line, help center (getting started, FAQ, developers, project managers, security & privacy), legal pages, contact.
- Tenant-wide live metrics at /status: DORA signals (deployment frequency, lead time, change-failure rate), per-environment deploy state, and a 14-day deploy trend — collected every 15 minutes from the platform itself and persisted for durable history. Live in all three environments.
- Public projects listing sourced from the planning app.
- The four-phase governance product in the planning app, including candidate elections mirroring the NYC Council process (nominate → secret ballot → quorum → revote-once → role assignment).
- Continuous deployment on the CodeNOW platform: every merge to main deploys to dev; staging and prod promote by fast-forward branch push; per-MR preview deploys via the GitLab webhook bot.
4. Recent Milestones
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2026-07-19 | Tenant-wide platform-metrics collector live in all three environments — /status now reads a tenant-wide snapshot (live app/env discovery, durable deploy history) instead of a single hardcoded app |
| 2026-07-18/19 | Two-product IA + plain-language rewrite + site-wide design pass — The Starting Line and the CodeNOW Platform each got their own landing page and nav; copy rewritten into plain NYC civic-tech language; masonry project cards, refreshed screenshots, real hardware photography |
| 2026-06-19 | Legal pages shipped (/privacy, /terms, /accessibility); dead links and the dark signup path closed |
| 2026-06-18 | Platform-first repositioning: the site leads with the governed platform story, with this website as the first example app |
| 2026-06-03 → 06-10 | NYC Council candidate-election voting shipped in the governance product; token-refresh hardening; greenfield code-health sweep |
| 2026-04-17 | SRO v1.0 — the four-phase governance product shipped end-to-end |
| 2026-04-14 | First green build on the CodeNOW nycmesh tenant |
Detailed dated records: docs/project-changelog.md and docs/development-roadmap.md in the repo.
5. In Progress & Next
- Access-model v1 rollout — unified access-model copy across the help center (mirrored from the planning app, parity-gated in CI) and the planning/web sign-up flow, promoting dev → staging → prod.
- Contact channels — the Talk-to-Matt modal renders only channels with real targets; email is live, scheduling/phone channels light up as they're configured.
- Preview-deploy MR comments — the preview bot deploys silently today; comment posting activates when a GitLab API auth surface becomes available.
- Prod CD quality gate — prod promotes by branch push today; the platform's Continuous Delivery gate remains available to configure per-environment.
- A11y in CI — the axe-core suite runs locally before every push; pipeline wiring is deferred until a custom test stage is registered on the tenant.
6. Non-Goals
- Become a general project-management tool (not a Jira/Asana competitor).
- Replace existing civic tech platforms.
- Financial/budget tracking.
- Volunteer logistics beyond team assignment.