GitHub has started publishing a public roadmap for its future releases. The GitHub public roadmap will provide more information about what features GitHub is working on and when it will ship them.
According to the organisation, the GitHub public roadmap is the natural consequence of their continued collaboration with the open source community, which includes the recently announced GitHub Discussions, as well as of the high rate at which GitHub has been introducing new features in the last year. Those include workflow improvements such as Actions, Packages, and Codespaces; better support for writing secure code; and new mobile, desktop, and CLI clients.
With more transparency into what we’re building, you can also plan better and share feedback earlier to influence what we’re building.
The GitHub public roadmap can be accessed through a project board in a GitHub repository. Each column on the project board represents an upcoming GitHub release with a list of planned features. For each feature, you can access a detailed issue with all relevant information. This includes what is planned, why it's important, when it will become available, and additional details.
Features are labelled so you can see what GitHub is working on for major areas of work.
While GitHub's public roadmap aims to include as much information as possible and will be updated regularly, it will not be exhaustive. Also important to note, the roadmap is meant to communicate GitHub plans, not really as a collaboration medium. Indeed, all issues are currently read-only and conversations are locked. This decision attempts to ensure all features originate from GitHub, says the company. Still, the open source community immediately started to open issues hoping to influence the GitHub process.
As a final note, it is worth noting that GitHub's competitor GitLab publishes a detailed overview of what will go into its upcoming releases, too. Similarly to GitHub's public roadmap, each feature is associated to an issue providing all relevant detail. GitLab additionally provides a tier-by-tier view of its roadmap as well as a comprehensive description of its [vision and three-year strategy](of its roadmap](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/paid_tiers/) as well as a comprehensive description of its vision and three-year strategy.
