In need of volunteer advisors/contributors for Teamnova's UX/UI design

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Project Name: Teamnova

Project Demo: https://teamnova-demo.vercel.app

Show HN Submission: Show HN: Empower the Next Generation of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) | Hacker News

Compensation: Gratis

Hi, everyone!

I’m Charlie, a full stack software developer based in Vancouver, Canada. I love building software side projects that can help others.

Teamnova, made in Vancouver with love, is on a mission to make mentorship in open source more accessible and inclusive.

While traditional Open Source Mentorship Programs (OSMPs) are excellent, they often lack a structured approach for effective team collaboration. The Apache maxim “Community Over Code” inspired me to think, “Why not create a new platform where mentors can help mentees improve both the hard and soft skills required for open source??” This is how the concept of Teamnova’s “S-Team” (Self-organizing Team) structure was born.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC), as one of the most prestigious OSMPs, is highly competitive. According to 2023 statistics, out of 43,765 applicants and 7,723 proposals submitted, only 967 GSoC contributors were accepted. We hope that Teamnova can help more people benefit from high-quality project-based mentorship programs like GSoC.

Teamnova will continue to be free and open source under the MIT license indefinitely. However, we anticipate that some fast-growing startups, such as Databricks (Apache Spark) and Confluent (Apache Kafka), and their respective open-source communities, will derive benefits from Teamnova open-source project in the future.

We would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, and suggestions as we continue to improve the “Open Source Design” of Teamnova. Feel free to contact us via teamnova@myyahoo.com or try out the demo platform at https://teamnova-demo.vercel.app.

We are enthusiastic about making high-quality project-based mentorship in open source more accessible and inclusive!

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Hi, my name is Isabella and I’m from Brazil. I’m a junior UI Designer and I’ll be happy to contribute with your project!

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So this is like a mentoring/coaching matching project? happy to see if I can help but would love to hear more about the scaling plans re. mentoring and coaching.

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Hi,
I’m a Wev Dev and I would love to help you.

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Hello,

My name is Eniz, and I’m a UX/UI Designer with 3 years of experience working in a design agency. I’d like to work on an open-source project in my free time.

Currently, I don’t have a portfolio to showcase my skills. If you’d like to test my abilities, feel free to send me a brief UX/UI task, and I’ll solve it. If you like how I handle the task, we can discuss potential collaboration.

In terms of my skills, I can highlight a very good understanding of design systems and their implementation and construction, also I’m familiar with Google Materials and iOS guidelines.

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Hi! I’m a UI/UX Designer and I’d love to volunteer :blush:

Been looking to work on open-source projects and I’m ready to do that to the best of my capacity.

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Thank you immensely for your unwavering support. Unfortunately, we must extend our sincere apologies as the UX research for this project has encountered unforeseen challenges, leading to several delays in our progress timeline. Despite these obstacles, we remain dedicated to overcoming them and greatly appreciate your continued patience and understanding.

Our initial phase of UX research draws inspiration from a critical finding from the Linux Foundation Research study titled ‘Mentorship in Open Source.’ The study highlights a common issue in mentorship programs: ‘Many mentorship programs are informal, with mentors and mentees often left to figure out how to work together best. This can make it difficult for mentees to get the support and guidance they need, leading to frustration and disengagement.’ In our preliminary solution, an S-Team for open source mentorship will consist of 1 maintainer as the lead mentor (serving as the product owner of the team and a long-term role model for new reviewers and students), 1 professional project manager as the mentor scrum master (Scrum for the ‘education’ part), 2-3 new reviewers as mentor developers, and 4-6 student as mentee developers. The primary responsibility of the lead mentor (maintainer) is to train the new reviewers to become good/great mentors in more effective and engaged way. Meanwhile, these new reviewers will mentor the students, aiding their emergence as new contributors through code reviews and other forms of personalized guidance. In our present design, Scrum is primarily applied to the ‘education’, informal learning and non-code contributions aspects of open-source mentorship, such as students reflecting on code reviews and the lessons learned. We hope that Scrum can help minimize the time input required from maintainers and reviewers in administrative tasks.

The next phase plans to introduce a pilot open-source mentorship program named ‘OpenDxD Summer of Collaborative Learning’. This program sets itself apart from the Google Summer of Code by emphasizing Cross-Functional Team Mentoring, Collaborative Learning, and the synergy between Designers and Developers. Experienced designers/developers and university students will collaborate in agile teams, designing and developing free landing page templates under the MIT license for open-source projects. Moreover, we are keen to leverage the power of open-source mentorship to tackle more complex UX design challenges in the future, such as creating user-friendly GUIs/dashboards for Kubernetes. However, as we prepare for the next phase, we face several challenges:

  1. Ideally, we hope to establish partnerships with exceptional open-source communities such as OSD, Kaleidos, and MUI to collectively enhance the experiment design of pilot mentorship programs. However, our inexperience in drafting effective cold emails for potential partnerships presents a notable challenge.

  2. We aim to creatively use exceptional open-source tools such as Taiga and Penpot to better recognize design contributions, similarly to how GitHub acknowledges code contributions. We also plan to develop an AI Mentor to address developers’ UX/UI design questions, enhancing communication and collaboration between designers and developers. We are seeking experienced UX researchers ready to join us as volunteer advisors.

  3. Following guidance from a leading expert in open source sustainability research, we are exploring the development of a new incentive model, distinct from Google Summer of Code. In this model, mentees are not individually financially compensated, but mentors may receive sponsorships from companies. Additionally, outstanding teams could be awarded attractive prizes similar to those offered at well-known hackathons. We are seeking experienced UX researchers ready to join us as volunteer advisors.

We welcome any contributions towards addressing those challenges and improving the cross-functional team mentoring experience in open-source projects.

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Thank you for your interest and willingness to contribute to our project. Indeed, Teamnova is dedicated to efficiently matching mentors with mentees within cross-functional teams, similar to the method employed by A.Team. To more accurately address your inquiry, could you please specify the particular aspects of our ‘scaling plans’ you wish to explore further? I am keen to offer detailed responses to your questions.

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By the way, has anyone here had experience with open-source tools like Taiga and Penpot?

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hi, I’m a designer, usually enjoying more logo design but I’m quite experienced in Penpot and UX.

your project sounds very interesting! let me know if you’re still looking for a designer to get involved :slight_smile:

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Yes, we are seeking volunteer advisors/contributors with experience in Taiga and Penpot to build an open source UX research team. This team will explore the interesting challenge of creatively using exceptional open source tools, such as Taiga and Penpot, to better recognize design contributions to open source projects, similar to how GitHub acknowledges code contributions. Conducting UX research with an open source mindset involves embracing openness, collaboration, and sharing throughout the research process. We can discuss more details via email.

You mentioned that you enjoy logo design. If you are interested in designing the logo for OpenDxD, please feel free to reach out. The ‘Ds’ in OpenDxD stand for Design and Development, respectively. Your expertise and creativity could greatly contribute to defining our visual identity.

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I’d love to help and be part of it. it’d be nice to discuss it further so I could get a general direction for the design or alternatively, you could provide me with reading material about the project, programme, goals, userbase and audience.

if you’d like to connect, you can send me an email with your favourite form of communication and we’ll take it on from there :slight_smile:

me@yotamguttman.com

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Hi, Yotam,

Thank you for your willingness to join us in addressing this important real-world problem within the Open Source UX Design community.

Regarding your request for “reading material about the project, program, goals, user base, and audience,” I recommend starting with this insightful interview: [Design and code in the first Open Chat with Penpot - Events and Announcements - Penpot Community]. It will provide you with a better understanding of the challenges OpenDxD aims to tackle alongside its partners.

If you’re open to conducting some user interviews about these challenges (e.g., how to leverage the power of UX design to make Open Source Software more usable and lovable) with experienced Penpot users, that would be fantastic. We can carry out this UX research in public and share the findings on this forum in the near future.

OpenDxD: Make Open Source Software More Lovable

The idea of OpenDxD, ‘The Dribbble+GitHub+ADPList of Open Source UX Design World’, was inspired by an insightful interview with Máirín Duffy conducted by Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz (Design and code in the first Open Chat with Penpot - Events and Announcements - Penpot Community).

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Thank you immensely for your unwavering support. Due to ongoing and significant uncertainties, some beyond our control, surrounding our strategic UX research and design/research-led innovation efforts for the Teamnova project, we’ve reluctantly decided, after much consideration, to put it on hold for the time being. However, our ongoing contributions to the sustainability of the open source community will not cease in the face of difficulties.

In its place, we are advancing the development of the OpenDxD Badges MVP—a streamlined Open Badge system designed for the OpenDxD project to promote cross-functional collaboration between developers and designers in the open source way. The fundamental idea of the system enables designers to issue ‘Awesome Developer to Work With’ OpenDxD Badges, accompanied by thank you messages, to developers, and vice versa. This facilitates a culture of mutual recognition and appreciation among peers.

I’m a big fan of the exceptional design work showcased in the Fedora Badges project (Fedora Badges) and find it unfortunate that such badges are only available to Fedora project contributors.

We are actively seeking volunteer designers and front-end developers to assist in crafting the templates for ‘Awesome Developer to Work With’ and ‘Awesome Designer to Work With’ OpenDxD Badges. If you are passionate about contributing to our open source initiatives, please reach out and let us know. Your skills and enthusiasm would be greatly appreciated.

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