I think that would be a good idea. And as @Erioldoesdesign says that is sort of the intention of the opensource design website but I think it suffers in the implementation of this on a number of levels.
The primary community interface is this forum which does not benefit from the network effect of a social media platform. OSD has a twitter with a decent sized but small following. There’s not much integration between the social media presence and this platform. The way I found OSD was through me googling the term, so if you’re a design student and don’t even know that OS is a thing then how would you find out about it much less get hooked into a project.
Most people here seem to be basically people who work in OS companies as designers (a very small cohort) while who OSD should be reaching out to:
- Normal designers
- open source developers in need of design
are left unattended. I think there are some ways that OSD could be improved to increase people’s engagement and the breadth of it’s reach (for instance a facebook page, a dribbble presence of some kind etc), but I also think this would probably need to take some adjustments on how things currently operate, and I’m not sure how open OSD is really to that. I see here is information on how the organization is structured: GitHub - opensourcedesign/organization: 📋 Organizational topics for the Open Source Design collective But I don’t really get a good sense of how I could get more involved in the process other than posting on this forum more.
OSD apparently has a 3k a year budget according to it’s Open Collective page. Where that money goes, I’m not clear on. There doesn’t appear to have been an in person event on that page since 2018 IE two years ago.
I think perhaps it might benefit OSD bringing in a wider base of people to help administer things. Just just my two cents. I organize in a couple of political activists groups in Austin TX and we have run into similar problems which I’ve tried to get around by opening up the doors for higher levels of participation more.
Even with that there can be an issue because many people might be interested in helping out but if they’re struggling to make ends meet then volunteer labor tends to fall to the bottom of the pile (and lets be real… designers tend to be struggling a lot more financially than devs which is perhaps part of why it’s hard to get get higher levels of engagement).
I think it might be smart to open up the doors to some undergrads and students though.