CAST YOUR VOTE: MRA final RoadMap vote

[MyRoute-app community]

Attention community,

The time has come to cast your final vote and help us prioritize the MRA RoadMap. We have prepared a definitive list of suggestions for the upcoming time. You can now vote for these suggestions. You can vote for one of the ten features. When all votes have been counted, we will eventually publish a final RoadMap. Interested in the results of the preliminary vote? You can check that out in the thread called "Results: MRA RoadMap vote 1" under announcements.

Cast your vote here:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/H8BQV7M
Voting will end on the 31st of March, 2020.

[Drabslab]

@Timo-Martosatiman-MRA

Done,

and considering the avalanche of new proposals on this forum, you should have no fear of having nothing to do anymore

I suppose that, in the final ranking, you will also consider "quick wins" which fall under the same scope as a top 10 item?

[MyRoute-app community]

@Drabslab Hi Drab, absolutely, for example if we'd move forward with multi-exporting (original feature #13, ranked 5th) we'd definitely try to scoop in sending multiple routes to MyDrive if the licences allow it (original feature #14, ranked 11th)

[Drabslab]

@Timo-Martosatiman-MRA Hai,

Its not a coincindence that you take exactly that example

You know that I have a mi (mild) obsession with number 23 "download the complete library" which did not make it to the final list unfortunately. The reason for that is that I know quite a few IT nerds (being one myself) and we are all terrified by "vendor lock-in".

Even when it comes to our hobby, we are exchanging horror stories about once upon a time faboulous technologies, web based solutions ... that at some point turned into a nightmare. Fairly recently, a once free photo database started charging an arm and a leg ... quite annoying when you have stored 10+ years of travelling photo's on that site.

Don't read me wrongly, I am not accusing MRA of anything and I am gradually uploading past tours onto MRA, if not only to clean my messy hard disk.

An option to download that super clean folderstructure would be nice though, for back-up reasons.

[MyRoute-app community]

@Drabslab I get that, really do. Before becoming the community manager at MRA I was a government IT-procurement specialist. In that role I danced the vendor-lock-in avoidance dance with de-facto monopolists in all its' paradoxical glory. Essence being that at any time you'd have to be ready to spit on sacred ground, topple the shrines holding premium systems and in doing so bring down an entire digital ecosystem with tentacles reaching system you're hardly aware of. That's the practical aspect. Let's not forget the zealous resistance you face from your own service, application and specialized-systems colleagues who'll start sprouting litanies of doom the moment you start mentioning the possibility of having to switch systems. I can go on about this for hours, but the essence is I really do understand.

From that experience I also draw my current line of community leadership. I'll be transperant and will always involve the community. Ocassionally, I'll explain a painful decision if that is neccecary and I think that is a trend I can validly prove here. Right now downloading the complete library is not something we'll add as a public feature for everyone to use simply because it moves us away from both our own vision and the one the community is currently outlining.

A healthy economy goes immediately down the drain when people start hoarding cash from the bank, a steady supply of goods will spiral into stimulating hoarding once people start overbuying toilet paper and a healthy server will go belly up if people start massing traffic. Right now there is no possibility to panic hoard at MRA because of this and we're very happy with that. The company is healthy and we're not in danger. Lots of people are at home spending more time on their computer than ever. Once the pandemic has been defeated, which is a matter of a few months at most, we'll see people desperate for freedom return on their travels again.

[Drabslab]

@Timo-Martosatiman-MRA

Hai Timo,

Point is that your efforts came too late. You entered an environment that was already completely locked in, and whatever you suggested to get out of that situation made everybody realize how tight the lock was, and how much work it would be to break the chain.

When I was evaluating vendors for a rather large organization, one standard question (which was afterwards firmly tested) was: "which standards do you fully support to move all data from - whatever it is you are trying to sell - to any other platform. And yes, sometimes this aspect was the determining element to select a vendor.

But, on this issue, and as an example only: remember Photo Bucket that unexpectedly changed its ways into charging a lot for its services, and practically holding its user's data hostage.

I am not questioning the health of MRA and this is not even suspicion that you would do something similar as photo bucket, but MRA (like the rest of us) does not control all aspects of its future, and events can lead to disaster. We usually discover the weaknesses behind our business continuity and disaster recovery systems by painful experience.

Transferring 20? years of travel data to MRA, and everything I will produce in future, without any decent option to retrieve all that data in case of need (whatever causes that need), is not a matter of "panic hoarding at MRA" but of voluntary vendor lock in, without any back-up, except when done manually. This is contradictory to using a system like MRA build to making fun of routing. Remaining polite, it's not a clever move.

Would you buy an IT system that does not facilitate making a back-up? I am quite hesitant knowing that there is no realistic way back which is putting the brake on what I do with MRA.

If the needed bandwidth would scare you then you could easily limit the back-up option to one download a year.

[Gary France]

Users have to be able to do a back-up of their route data. This is such valuable information to users, they need to make sure they can back this up. Once a year is nowhere near enough. I currently back mine up once a week.

[MyRoute-app community]

@Gary-France Hi Gary, while the feature does not offer bulk-downloading your routes, you can always download your routes individually. Regardless, your suggestion has been noted.