[openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website] Point potential contributors to the Roadmap (PR #6543)

[Andy Allan]

gravitystorm left a comment (openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website#6543)

When I read the PR I felt it didn't quite hit the spot in a way that I found hard to articulate, but let me try.

Firstly, the roadmap has a much wider scope than just this project, because it covers "core software" in general and not just the stuff we maintain here. This can be confusing if someone reads the roadmap and thinks that any particular problem mentioned there is therefore related to this project (e.g. osmdbt). So this difference in scope should be made clear in this PR.

The proposed documentation in this PR is also slightly confusing when it mentions "the project". At first it seems to refer to openstreetmap-website, but then it makes more sense in places for it to mean the wider "OpenStreetMap project" when referring to the roadmap, because "we" (as developers of this project) certainly didn't propose changes or features for other projects!

The roadmap also contains a completely different definition of Developer Experience than what we use here. In the roadmap, it's all about developers using the OSM data and building things on top of that (hence discussion of switch2osm, welcome mat, extract formats etc) whereas for us, Developer Experience is about making it easier for people to contribute to this codebase, e.g. installing dependencies, writing code, running tests. This again can be confusing when the roadmap is read in terms of openstreetmap-website, instead of core openstreetmap software in more general terms.

Overall the roadmap feels more like a description of what OSMF wants to focus on, both to indicate what they intend to work on and to manage expectations of what they won't be working on. Which makes complete sense, and with paid staff it's better to have a rough plan! Thankfully the bits that are relevant to this project are (mostly) aligned with what I want to see too (I'll let other maintainers/developers chime in if they feel differently). 

However, both the roadmap and this PR have the issue that it really sounds like if it's not on the roadmap, you have to make a suggestion to have it considered for being added. That's fine if you expect the OSMF team to focus on your topic, but that's really not the case for contributing to this repo. If a contributor comes along out of the blue with an entirely different feature that's useful and meets our general criteria, but that feature is not even hinted at in the roadmap, I don't want them to feel they need to persuade anyone to add it to the roadmap, instead of just adding the feature directly here as normal. All four paragraphs of this PR are phrased in a way that discourages contributions that don't align with the roadmap, but the roadmap is to set expectations of what other people are working on, and not meant to discourage any other non-roadmap contributions.

Wow, that was more words than I intended. But to sum up - yes, I think it's reasonable to link to the roadmap, but let's figure out a better way to phrase things and add a bit more clarity to exactly how it relates to this project.

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