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Roadmap

Honest snapshot of what's shipped, what's next, and what's aspirational. Updated as the platform evolves — if a feature moves categories, this page moves with it.

Last reviewed: 2026-07.

Shipped (MVP)​

Everything in this section is live in the production codebase today and documented in the User + Developer Guides.

Identity and access​

  • Email + password registration with bcrypt cost 12
  • Email verification via one-time link
  • JWT access tokens + OWASP refresh-token family rotation
  • Forgot / reset password
  • Full self-service account deletion (soft delete + PII anonymization)
  • Representative and organization applications with admin review

Communities​

  • All 36 states + FCT and 774 LGAs of Nigeria seeded
  • Primary vs. active community
  • 30-day cooldown on primary-community changes

Issues​

  • Report an issue with title, description, category, location, up to 5 photos
  • OPEN → UNDER_REVIEW → IN_PROGRESS → RESOLVED → CLOSED status lifecycle
  • Upvoting (one per account)
  • Comment threads with official-response tagging for reps / orgs / admins
  • Content flagging (5 reasons) with moderator resolution and hidden placeholders

Petitions​

  • Create with title, description, goal, deadline, photos
  • Signing (one per account) with community-membership requirement
  • Milestone notifications at 25 %, 50 %, 100 %
  • Comment threads

Representatives​

  • Per-community rep profiles with bio, party, contact info
  • Follow / unfollow
  • Comment thread (official responses fan out to every follower)
  • Public response rate metric

Organizations​

  • Registry with NATIONAL / STATE / LGA / COMMUNITY jurisdiction
  • Internal roles (OWNER / ADMIN / STAFF)
  • Public announcements (DRAFT → PUBLISHED → ARCHIVED)
  • Projects with status, budget in kobo, community link
  • Issue assignments — orgs take responsibility for citizen reports
  • Progress updates on assigned issues and projects
  • Verified-badge trust signal (audit-logged separately)

Notifications​

  • In-app notification list with unread badge
  • Real-time delivery via Server-Sent Events
  • Notification types: issue update, petition update, rep response, system, community update

Discover + search​

  • Global search across issues, petitions, representatives
  • Discover feed tiered by geographic proximity (COMMUNITY → LGA → STATE → COUNTRY)

Moderation infrastructure​

  • Content flags with 5 reason categories
  • Moderator queue with hide / dismiss actions
  • Direct-hide admin shortcut
  • Shared audit log across all four services

Admin tooling​

  • Platform metrics snapshot
  • Per-community stats drill-down
  • User administration (list, role change, ban / unban)
  • Application review queue

Platform​

  • Four Go microservices behind an API gateway
  • Per-action rate limiting via Redis
  • Interactive Swagger UI at /docs
  • This documentation site

Next (planned, not started)​

Features we intend to build in the next phase. Not in the codebase yet — treat as commitments, not promises.

  • Public consultations — structured multi-question surveys tied to a community, with a submission window and public results.
  • Wider notification channels — email digests, optional SMS.
  • Full-text search — replace the current ILIKE sweep with Postgres pg_trgm or Meilisearch as the dataset grows.
  • CI check for OpenAPI mirror sync — enforce that docs/api/openapi-*.yaml and the embedded gateway copies stay in sync.
  • Uploads on durable storage — move from local disk to S3-compatible object storage before scaling out.

Later (aspirational)​

Ideas that fit the mission but haven't been scoped in detail. Some require significant infrastructure or new engineering primitives.

  • CivicAI — LLM assistance for summarizing long consultation threads, drafting official responses, and improving search recall. Assist-not-replace.
  • Plugin architecture — a way for organizations to extend the platform without forking. Non-trivial security surface; will only happen with a clear sandbox model.
  • Multi-country deployment — CivicOS is Nigeria-first by design. Second-country deploys require rethinking the primary-community cooldown and the state/LGA seed data.
  • Richer analytics — engagement metrics per representative and organization, exposed publicly. Needs privacy review.
  • Managed CivicOS Cloud — a hosted deployment path for organizations that don't want to run their own. Not committed to.

Not on the roadmap​

Things we're deliberately not building.

  • Algorithmic engagement feed. The Discover feed is time-ordered and tier-labelled — no engagement optimization.
  • Anonymous participation. Accountability requires verified identities.
  • Paid verification. Verification is either automatic (email) or admin-reviewed (rep / org applications). No money path.
  • Ads. The platform is open source; there is no revenue model that depends on user attention.

Roadmap changes​

Category changes (Next → Shipped, Later → Next) happen when:

  • Shipped — merged to main and released.
  • Next — an issue exists with a design doc and a rough timeline.
  • Later — someone has articulated the shape but no work is underway.

If you want to move something up, open an issue on GitHub with the rationale.