DNN-Connect 2023 has only been over for a little more than 2 weeks, but already it feels like a long time. As always, when you get home, normal life kicks in again and it could be easy to forget about the great things we did and learned during the conference.

One of those things was our brown paper session about "How to improve DNN" where we tried to get everyone's input on where the most needed, or most desired improvements in DNN could be.

Personally, I loved facilitating the session with Vicenc, and from what I heard, the attendees liked it as well. As mentioned during the session, it would be a little pointless to have such a session and not do anything with the valuable outcome of it. That's why we asked for people to take the lead on a certain topic, and that's also why I am now writing this blog post.

Below, you will find a picture of each of the "topics" we had mentioned on the brown paper, with the related post its on it. Below the photo we will have links to forum topics for the topics we addressed during the meeting, and that had a volunteer to lead it.

Please do feel free to join one of these topics, but also to take up another topic from the session: we're happy to create a forum topic for you to help you communicatie with interested community members.

The session was split up in 3 stages:

1. All attendees were invited to put post its on the brown paper with everything they could think of that could use some attention in DNN
2. Then, everyone received 5 green dot stickers to put on any post it they concidered important
3. Finally, we ran (yes, we were in a bit of a hurry) over the topics with the most green dots per topic, to group them, briefly discuss and try to find a lead for them

To me, the most suprising part of the session, probably was the emptyness of the Issues/bugs topic:

Users

The group of post-its where Peter Donker volunteered to lead for, had these texts:

• Delegating User Management
• Default role Content manager
• Editor role (like in Evoq)

And here's the link to the forum topic

Administration

Although quite a few post-its for this topic, there weren't that many green dots, and also no issues with a lead for it.

Images

Pretty much the other way around from Administration, we have images: few post-its, but more green dots and we even have two leads:

The post-it's under Daniel Mettler's lead, read:

• Good image resizer
• Auto scale (prevent 3MB photos)
• Image processing thumbnails
• Auto convert to webp

And here's the link to the forum topic

Marnix Bouwman volunteered to take the lead for:

• Better WYSIWYG editor

Count me in on this one, Marnix.

And here's the link to the forum topic

Design / UI

The area Dave Lee signed up for, has these 2 post-its:

• More control over URL for multiple languages
• Better URL management

And here's the link to the forum topic

Developer experience

I haven't counted them, but this might be the area where we have the most green dots. The post it Peter Donker volunteered for is:

• API Token Authentication

And here's the link to the forum topic

Given the number of green dots, it would be great if someone was to volunteer for:

• Razor based theme

Localization

With mostly European attendees, localization is always an interesting topic. Vicenc Masanas voluteered to take the lead for two topics here:

• ML: Search for key/text (across files)

And here's the link to the forum topic

• Language packs

And here's the link to the forum topic

Community / Marketing

A topic with an immense number of post-its, but not that many green dots. So: a lot of ideas, but not much priority. However, we did find Cathy Lee to volunteer for the highest priority here:

• Create an "Eco design" community/group and provide a page to share ideas on the commmunity website

And here's the link to the forum topic

Install experience

And last but not least: the installation experience. very little post-its, but a few high-prioritized ones:

The one for Peter Schotman:

• Easily update extensions from within DNN

And here's the link to the forum topic

Finally the issue Rory James volunteered for:

• Azure scale-up

And here's the link to the forum topic

Since this really was an experiment, we will definitely be looking how to continue this path in the conferences to come. And to all the volunteered leads I'd like to say: you didn't volunteer to do it all by yourself. Use the forum and facebook (and whatever means you have) to find yourself a team, define the problem, set specific goals and see what you can do.

thanks to all attendees for making the session a success.

There.
I hope you enjoyed our time together, today.
You know, it seems harder and harder to just sit back and enjoy the finer things in life.
Well, 'til next time... tata!
(yes, that's from The Offspring)