Activating the Livepeer Ecosystem Roadmap — What’s Changing and How to Get Involved
The Ecosystem roadmap at roadmap.livepeer.org has never fully satisfied us. It’s basically been a display board rather than a genuine two-way system between the Contributors, Foundation and the broader community.
We’re now fixing that. I’ll explain what’s changing and what we need from everyone in the ecosystem.
What the Roadmap Is For
The roadmap exists to make ecosystem direction visible, coherent, and participatory.
It is not a promise or a project plan. It is a shared and evolving view of where the network is headed. This includes projects being worked on, who is driving them, and where there are opportunities to pick things up or get involved.
Every item on the roadmap defines a problem, a desired outcome, and who owns it. Items previously came from only two sources:
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Advisory Board Recommendations — captured from the project with domain experts last year
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Foundation Priorities — strategic improvements identified and funded by the Foundation
And, excitedly we now introduce a third way for things to enter the roadmap:
- Community Suggestions — ideas submitted and validated through our community process
In this way, the Roadmap becomes further signalling for the things people want to see come to the network, and a way for everyone to put forward impactful projects and provide upvotes are genuine input signals — not performative ones — towards what gets prioritised.
Why a Community Intake Process Matters
Until now, there has been no clear path for a community member to propose something and see it taken seriously without testing it with a formal forum post or completing an SPE proposal. A lot of great suggestions and discussions were had in Discord or raised on Watercooler’s, but with no structured process, no feedback loop, and no progress, many were lost.
That’s a problem for two reasons. First, the ecosystem has real expertise distributed across contributors, orchestrators, builders, and delegators. Some of the best ideas about what Livepeer needs to build next will come from people outside Inc and the Foundation. Second, without a visible process, community participation in the roadmap is essentially performative and people have no reason to engage if engagement doesn’t lead anywhere.
A real intake process changes that. It creates accountability on both sides: the community commits to submitting well-formed proposals and raising the standard of what we want to see from suggestions, and the Foundation commits to reviewing them, providing a space and rituals for them to see further discussion, and publishing those discussions and any decisions to help advance items in ways that make sense.
The New Community Suggestions Process
Anyone in the Livepeer ecosystem can now propose a roadmap item at any time. Here’s how it works:
Step 1 — Submit a proposal
Go to roadmap.livepeer.org and click “Suggest an Item” (in future you will be able to simply type /featurebase directly in Discord). A good proposal answers three things: What is the problem? Why does it matter for the ecosystem? What does success look like?
I’ve included two project “proposals” that were recommended as part of the discussions on the emissions system which can act as helpful examples and jumpstart the monthly call:
Step 2 — Community upvoting (ongoing)
All proposals are publicly visible in the roadmap with the tag “Propose Ecosystem Project”. Upvote and comment on proposals you care about at any time. Momentum is tracked — strong community support between monthly cycles can fast-track a proposal into the next review.
Step 3 — Foundation weekly review
We will aim to review the proposal queue every week and provide some feedback about how to prepare for the monthly Discord call. The aim here is to get things well prepared and to knock out early things that are maybe not going to reach a bar that we all feel is needed for high quality suggestions.
Step 4 — Monthly Discord call
Once a month proposals are presented on a community Discord call (if not the Watercooler, another forum). We’ll make a quick intro for each including upvotes and comments, the Proposer can give a short discussion, and then community asks questions and discusses live. After the call, the Foundation will publish key information and based on sentiment aim to reach a decision that can be shared: Promoted to Roadmap, Held for Next Cycle, or Declined with a public explanation.
Proposals that are promoted join the roadmap with status Under Review and from there move forward to planning - most likely as an RFP, a SPE Proposal, or some other mechanism that makes sense (more on this to come).
How to Use the Roadmap
The roadmap will work best when the community is actively engaged. We’ll start to talk about it more effectively on the Watercooler. But here’s what we need from you:
Upvote items you care about. This does two things: it signals priorities to the item owners, and it subscribes you to all future updates on that item. When an item’s status changes, you’ll be notified automatically. Your upvote has a visible consequence.
Comment on items. Share context, ask questions, flag concerns, or offer to contribute. Comments are read by item owners and the Foundation. Good comments surface edge cases and use cases that owners may not have considered. Good feedback here can shut things down before wasting everyones time, but also can give the right spark for a simple idea to be a gamechanger!
Follow the changelog at roadmap.livepeer.org/changelog. Every major milestone on a roadmap item generates a changelog entry. This is the progress reporting mechanism for the ecosystem — if you want to know what’s actually shipping, the changelog is where to look.
Propose new items if you think something important is missing. The bar for submitting is low — a clear problem statement, the reason is matters, and what the future looks like if that proposed item becomes a success. The intake process can take it from there. Items might make it to the roadmap, or be bundled or merged with others “under” an SPE.
For teams shipping roadmap items: update your item’s status when it changes (this auto-notifies everyone who upvoted), and post a changelog entry at each major milestone. The changelog is your public progress report — it replaces ad hoc updates scattered across Discord and forum threads.
A Note on What This Is Not
This is not a governance mechanism. In time this can become a good funnel for the onchain treasury but for now we want this to become a way to surface useful recommendations and priorities and created a clearer, more participatory and better recorded feedback loop. The proposed items and upvotes are strong input signals — not binding votes. This is intentional: it keeps the roadmap strategically coherent while ensuring community voice is genuinely considered and visibly acted upon.
If a proposal is declined, people will know why. Transparency is a key part of this commitment. And people can always still take things to a vote onchain.. this just raises the bar for proposing something if it’s already been tested with the community in this way
Get Started
The roadmap is already live at roadmap.livepeer.org. The suggestions board is open now.
If you’ve had something in mind that Livepeer shoud be building or capitalising on, now is a great time to share it. We will run the first Monthly call at the end of Mark. And if you have questions or feedback just drop them in here.