Exchange on experiences and methods – best practices

I started a thread in our organization github repo on cross-project collaboration and communication between opensourcedesigners.

While the discourse may serve as such a platform, we need to fill it with content and live. One idea which may be particularly relevant is the “community of practice”, “A group of people sharing information and experiences to develop personally and professionally.”

Typical topics may be

  • “how do I deal with that conflict?”
  • “I tried paper prototyping recently, here are my pros and cons so far!”
  • "I want to provide a coded mock, I struggle with the CSS

An example for such a community may be Anthrodesigners and its mailinglist.

I would be interested in best practices on how to make such a community thrive and how we want to develop this further

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I always wanted in the Open Source Design community to be able to discuss solutions between us. This can go in 2 way (maybe there are more):

  1. Share and ask for feedback / solutions for some design component in your preferred / regular open source community. For example, me sharing some XWiki design problem and decide together which would be the better approach.

  2. Take an entry from the Job Board for a new organization and solve it.

Doing things collaboratively I think it will allow us to see how we approach problems, how we communicate, how we do the visual representations, etc. And we can learn from each other this way.

The only downside I see is the time constraint. For the ones that contribute for a long time in Open Source, they know that these discussions take time, especially the design ones since are subjective. The more people participating, the longer the talk. Especially if it’s not stated from the start how the conclusion will be taken (first-come-first-serve, majority vote, committer decision, time limit, etc.)

Because of this time limit we cannot take as exercise design decisions that need to be delivered in a particular roadmap or for organizations that are impatient.

Maybe you had something else in mind when you opened this topic, but this is what I would be interested in experiencing / learning. Maybe you wanted a more theoretical approach, while I would go for doing the practical exercises.

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This sort of “getting advice” would very well go together with what I propose. I am less sure about solving design tasks themselves (not only advice but doing “the whole thing”), as you say, there are time constraints and uncertainty about decisions (both very context/organization/project specific), which may take so much time that they distract from learning and exchanging about skills and methods.

Maybe designers can think out loud a bit here in the forum as they go about their day or week or whatever. That way we can all learn from each other here and there.

Dave Winer has post about this called “Narrate Your Work” at http://scripting.com/stories/2009/08/09/narrateYourWork.html and there’s another writeup at http://blogs.perficient.com/digitaltransformation/2011/02/09/collaborate-by-narrating-your-work/

I’m sure we’re all working on interesting stuff. We can benefit from a little peek into each other’s worlds.

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