The first version of the Community Toolkit spec had seven features: events with RSVPs, a member directory, an announcement feed, payments for dues, a document library, role-based permissions, and email digests. Reading it back, it looks less like a v1 and more like a five-year roadmap someone wrote in one sitting.

That's a pattern worth naming, because it's not specific to this project. When you're excited about a problem, the scope grows with the excitement, not with what's actually needed to help the first real user.

The question that cut it down

The thing that actually narrowed it wasn't a planning framework — it was a conversation with someone who runs a community garden's sign-up sheet by hand. She didn't want payments or role permissions. She wanted people to stop texting her individually to ask what time Saturday's cleanup started.

That's an event page with an RSVP. That's it. Everything else on the original list was solving a problem nobody had actually described to us yet.

What made the cut

  • Event pages with RSVPs — the thing that was actually asked for.
  • A simple member directory — came up in the second conversation, with a different group, independently. Two unprompted mentions was enough signal to include it.
  • An announcement feed — the smallest possible version of "stop repeating yourself in three group chats."

What got cut, and why that's fine

Payments, permissions, document storage, and email digests all got pushed out of v1 — not deleted, just not yet. None of them were things anyone had asked for by name. They were things that seemed like they'd probably be needed eventually, which is a much weaker signal than someone describing a specific problem they have today.

If nobody's asked for it yet, it's not a feature you're behind on. It's a feature you haven't earned the right to build yet.

Where it stands now

The three-feature version is live and being used by two community gardens for actual event sign-ups. That's a much smaller thing than the original seven-feature spec — and it's also the only version that would have ever shipped. The bigger version is still sketched out in an issue, waiting for someone to actually ask for the next piece.

If you want to see where it's at, or if you're the person who's about to ask for feature four, the repo is open — check it out on GitHub.