Document Assembly Line Q3 2025 update

Here are some highlights of our work since June.

On this page

Volunteer opportunities

In Q3 we launched a new volunteer program and were quickly overwhelmed by the response! We identified 4 core volunteer opportunities/needs:

  • Updating interviews (ongoing)
  • Testing interviews (annual project)
  • Translating interviews (as-needed)
  • Information gathering (as-needed)

We could also use a few volunteers to help manage volunteer projects.

We are working on onboarding the first wave of volunteers now. When we’re ready for the next wave, we’ll notify everyone who has filled out the volunteer signup form.

New court and legal aid partnerships!

We added service contracts with two legal aid organizations in Q3:

Our partnerships are featured on the front page of the Document Assembly Line website.

Community workshops

New workshops:

If you want to attend our First-Wednesday Workshops, you can register here.

You can view recordings of our workshops on the LIT Blog, and we’ve collected them in a playlist on our YouTube channel.

Alert!

Our workshops are moving to 4pm Eastern (an hour later) on the first Wednesday of each month. If you are in the Document Assembly Line team in Teams, you can view our community meeting schedule.

Software updates

Here are some of the highlights among our recent software updates:

  • AssemblyLine
    • Speed improvements by reducing the number of things that happen on page load
    • Improved translations
    • Various quality-of-life improvements, including some new functions for common tasks
    • New “catchall” custom Jinja filters
    • Lots of documentation updates, including tables of contents on AssemblyLine module reference pages
  • ALKiln
    • Continued improvements to make randomized testing easier to implement
    • ALKiln can now generate tests
    • Randomized testing is now available for GitHub-based tests
    • Coming soon: randomized testing for ALKiln in the Playground!
  • E-filing service provider and EFSP integration
    • Extensive refactoring
    • Better/more specific error messages and logs when a user sees an error screen

For more detailed release notes, see these links.

Development roadmapping process

The Document Assembly Line is an open-source project that has been shaped by community input since its inception. But we have also been working on a more formal process for gathering input and shaping the project development roadmap.

Like everything we do, the development roadmap will be a work in progress, but here is the current plan:

  • We will hold our first annual roadmap voting meeting in January
  • In the next few weeks, we will start gathering input from the community, including our partners
  • Before the vote, a community “framing” committee will meet to triage the input and prepare the voting board
    • We’re working on a way to include consideration of our available resources (i.e., time)
    • There will be must-do (i.e., support, maintenance, and contract deliverables) projects, and there may be can’t-do projects
  • We will use a version of “dot voting” to encourage discussion and consideration
  • After the meeting, we will announce our 2026 priorities!