Roadmap to 2030: The Horizon of Network Management

Published on Mon 29 December 2025 by Federico Capoano

Category: news

For the past 13 years, I have had the privilege of contributing to OpenWISP and growing alongside this community. During this time, I have continuously collected feedback from users, contributors, and partners, reflecting on the long-term direction required to keep open-source network management at the cutting edge.

I have synthesized these years of notes and community dialogue into a structured vision for the coming years: the Roadmap to 2030.

This roadmap outlines the technical and strategic paths I intend to pursue to ensure OpenWISP remains a capable, accessible, and versatile system for modern, heterogeneous networking environments.

Key Strategic Themes

Frictionless deployment: Move toward a day-one ready approach by simplifying installation workflows and providing clear, sensible default configurations that work out of the box.
Refined user experience: Improve the interface of core modules so that frequent operations, such as device onboarding, configuration, monitoring, and firmware upgrades, are intuitive and accessible, even for users with limited technical background.
Community-driven feature parity: Address long-standing feature requests from the community and reduce functional gaps compared to proprietary network management solutions.
Ecosystem agnosticism: Expand support beyond OpenWrt by improving compatibility with other operating systems and adopting standard protocols such as NETCONF, YANG, TR-069, and TR-369. This will allow OpenWISP to manage a wider range of hardware and software platforms, making it useful to a larger audience.

Help Us Build the Future

While this roadmap represents my personal vision for the project, it can only be realized through collective effort. We are actively seeking:

Technical contributions: Help us implement these architectural changes, start contributing!
Funding and sponsorship: Financial support is vital to accelerate development and ensure long-term sustainability. Consider sponsoring OpenWISP.
Community feedback: I invite you to read the full roadmap document and share your thoughts in the dedicated GitHub Discussions thread to help refine these goals.

Read the full document here: Roadmap to 2030.

I welcome your feedback to help shape the roadmap and make this vision a reality!