Dedicated hack day to identify the top 5 issues that need attention

[pllim]

This was brought up during Astropy Coordination Meeting 2025 breakout on "dealing with stalled development efforts." This was one of the ways to encourage developers to address long-standing, open issues.

• Maybe do this for each astropy subpackage
• But there will be items that cross subpackages (elevate these in terms of priorities?)

Unclear from the notes when such a hack day would occur and who would attend. Maybe next Coordination Meeting, in another conference where there is a quorum of Astropy developers, dev telecon, or especially organized?

James Tocknell: It may be worth identifying why such issues are open for so long? Is it because of lack of time from the maintainer to do the implementation, lack of time to get agreement from third parties (e.g., maintainers of other sub-packages or downstream), lack of time for design and/or something else.

[astrofrog]

I think we should definitely do this before the next coordination meeting. This could just be an especially organized remote event?

[pllim]

xref:

• Astropy Coordination Meeting 2026 (¡Quinceñera!) #472

[pllim]

Also, we did not discuss how best to capture these top issues. Project board?

[kelle]

It would actually be ideal to do this before/during the Cycle 5 funding round.

i think it's fine to use a google doc to document discussions and then maybe record the results in a PR (or a series of PRs) to the Roadmap.