Introductions (come in, say hi)

Hello all!

My formal education is in architecture and marketing. During my career I’ve done everything from graphic to industrial design. Seven years ago I was crazy enough to start my own creative agency and fortunate to have partnered since with some amazing people. When asked what I do for a living I am most proud to say I am a designer.

I choose to use free-and-open-source software, and to contribute by whatever means I can, because I see it as a way to create opportunities for people–especially for people with fewer choices in life than I have. It has also allowed me to reclaim a lot of lost freedom and pleasure in using technology.

It has been a great honor for me as I’ve become increasingly involved over the last couple years to associate with the people of the free software movement. You are a strange lot ;), but as a whole some of the most generous, resourceful, and creative people I know. I’m glad to know you.

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Hello Justin, you’re very welcome here. Now that you’re here, you can never leave! Muhaha! :wink:

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Hello @everyone,
I’m @xuv, you may know me from Github, Twitter or Mastodon under the same handle. :wink:
We might have also met AFK at Libre Graphics Meetings in Spain, Leipzig or London.
Anyway, really interested by the subject here and re-discovering Discourse and how even better it has become. Looking forward to the discussions here.
Julien

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Hi, i’m @aolko.
Know & can do: front-end (except modern vanila js (i’m a jquery person)) with sass wizardry, backend (php+mariadb/mysql), ps, bit of ai/affinity designer, adobe animate (previously known as flash) animations, some of ae/premiere/vegas.

Trying to push my web-projects right now, but can help you with your project design :slight_smile:

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Hello my name is @jensreu (or ohyran@mastodon.cloud on mastodon) I am an illustrator and graphics designer in Sweden who started the KDE Visual Design Group to assist with design, UI and UX as well as general communication and making it more open to contributors in general to avoid the ivory tower tendencies within the design subject.

Aside from that I have done mostly illustration and graphics design professionally - and I have done some communication work for a few firms here whenever the mood hit me.

My interests are mostly to de-mystify design as a skill/task to allow for more people to get involved in it, understand it and feel empowered to be a part of it. As such I prefer a strongly motivated, enthusiastic and epic failure way more than a mediocre and carefully planned success.
I am fond of and fascinated by humans, I get bored quickly and get enthusiastic even quicker (Think of me basically like a labrador with opposable thumbs who can see colors and hold a crayon)

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One of the best autobiographical one-liners of all time. :smiley:

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Hi. I’m an interaction design / user research / UX consultant with a particular focus on trying to make technologies have actively positive psychological and social-psychological impacts (“positive computing”), as well as being easy and pleasing to use (usability and UX).

Edward Snowden’s revelations are what gave me a really powerful (rather than abstract and theoretical) sense that free and open source software is essential for technology that people integrate into their personal lives, relationships, and selves.

I want to help make it easier for non-technical people to find and adopt technologies that deserve their trust and truly help them flourish.

So, I’m very glad to have discovered this group! Thanks to @jdittrich for telling me about opensourcedesign.net and Hi to @mray with whom I work on https://snowdrift.coop where we’re working to create a much more effective way for people to come together to fund public goods including, but not limited to, free and open source software.

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Hi there!

I’m a free software activist with a knack for minimalist design. I recently moved to Brussels where I started a non-profit called Petites Singularités, whose mandate is to explore aesthetic arrangements based on existing and emerging collective practices with free software. I also registered a company called Symphrene which I mention just because I like the logo :slight_smile:

This year I was appointed to the programming direction of the Libre Software Meeting that happens to mention design a lot, although unfortunately (almost?) nobody from here seems to have proposed anything. Although the CFP is now closed, it would be nice to have more design there. One of the topic I insisted on for LSM is to define a Libre Aesthetics: engagement, participation, cooperation which I invite you to explore in a conversation on p.s.:'s own discourse towards an upcoming publication.

With devuan I tried hard to figure a way that includes users and designers in the process, but unfortunately my plan was ditched for obscure reasons (and is being reimplemented step by step with another platform) after I had spent a year working on it. I think kindness is an underrated design pattern.

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Hi, I am an experience designer at Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com). I am donated full time back to the WordPress.org open source project. I am really interested in encouraging and enabling other designers to contribute to open source.

I currently live in Northamptonshire, UK - pretty much the middle of the country. As I work for a fully remote company, I tend to move around a bit though and really love meeting new people that contribute to open source.

I am really excited to reach outside of WordPress by being part of this community. I have a lot to learn from everyone here and hope to also add to the conversation. :heart:

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I am kinda late to the party here since I have been busy starting my own thing here in Stockholm. I am a very long term Nextcloud supporter and contributor who moved from New Delhi to Stockholm last year. Some of the people met me earlier this year at FOSDEM 17.

For a living, I consult on web and mobile projects as an Interaction Designer. On the side, I work as a photographer (mostly landscapes and street). I have an Unsplash profile which you guys could check out in case you want to use some of my stuff for free.

Otherwise, I love backpacking and playing table tennis.
Glad to be here! :slight_smile:

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Hi all!

I will be joining the summit at the 18th of October, 2017. So with this I will introduce myself.

I am a Dutch UX designer at GitLab, working mostly on the technical aspects of making git usable and extending on it with discussion and continues integration/deployment features. I love open source as it has enabled me to do and learn so much. Especially finding the way to mutually come to an awesome end result is a strong motivation. I have a preference for working on tool/meta related projects, in which the community as a whole benefits.

I hope to be of help towards the community in this effort as well.

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Hi all,

Great to meet many of you virtually on the call! Here is a belated introduction.

I am CEO of Yes Exactly, Inc. a web development firm based in western MA. My company incubates startups and provides infrastructure and staff augmentation to seed stage companies. I wear a lot of different hats (designer, project manager, and in a pinch, developer). Recent projects include Zappen image recognition / augmented reality, customizations to the Ampache open source streaming media application, and Beerious?, a beer events app. I’ve also worked pro bono on several FOSS projects independent of my company affiliation.

My passion is helping designers connect with developers to improve usability in free software and open source projects.

My personal site is artmeetscode.org. You can find my Lightning Talk from 32C3 up there, along with assorted blog posts and links.

Look forward to meeting folks in person in Berlin! I’ll be there all week.

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Hi there,

My name is Geoffroy and I am from Canada. I’ve started studio ponnuki about 5 years ago working on web and graphic design. I use a fully open source stack, from the OS I use to the router and phone I use (although android is not 100% open source).

You can say that I aim toward being a Full Stack Designer, from photo to illustration to calligraphy, front end and a bit of node.js / database. Most of my projects are quite small at this point, but I enjoy doing all parts.

It’s great to see this community here. I was about to publish an article on using only open source tools to run a design studio, 6 years later (I’ve written such an article 6 years ago). But in a nutshell ‘It works!’

I’ve also started a small publishing company encrelibre.com (only publish a few books so far, a couple more to come this winter) using again only open source tools. And love experimenting with open hardware and electronics… too many hats…

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Hi all,

I’m Rasmus. Great to find this community! I’ve been pursuing open design for years and years - but frankly dropped the whole idea after finding it too difficult to onboard others (started trying in 2007). It’s really quite awesome to see it pop up again with renewed energy!

I’m the lead product manager and lead UX of the Magnolia CMS. It’s an open source CMS which has a community edition + enterprise editions.

Past: Design team lead and brand manager of TYPO3 + UX lead of the Neos project.

I’ve helped the good folks at Netlify CMS a bit on the author experience side - and seeing things like https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/issues/490 just makes me want to cry big tears of joy :slight_smile:

Currently working on launching a larger open design project at Magnolia.

Today, I do equal parts product strategy, product management, UX and research. Live in Copenhagen, Denmark but travel a lot. I’m typically in Basel, Switzerland a couple of times a month. I often give conference talks or facilitate workshops about software design, UX, CMS etc. Also did a talk at FOSSASIA a couple of years ago.

Quite sad not to make the summit in Berlin but hope to see someone soon! I’m quite ready to contribute in various ways and to spread the word!

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Let us know when you publish it! We’ll gladly repost it in our articles section and also share it on the twitters :). Feel free to make a thread for it here as well.

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You should submit a talk for FOSDEM, which is in Brussels in January! cc @victoria-bondarchuk.

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Hi everyone, nice to meet ya’ll!

I’m just joining in now and checking out the forum and the OSD site. I’m a designer that started in UX design and research, began expanding to UI and now starting to dev on my on front end projects. One of these projects is a simple top-view driving game - I’d really like to be making games.

My involvement with open source is nearly nothing. I was interested in it during my college years and used Ubuntu thru grad school but when I got an industry job, I put my head down and focused on proprietary work.

One of the things I like about this community so far is the mix of designers and developers (and people who do both). I’m tired of being in designer-only communities because I want to talk more about how things are actually built and incorporate the building in the designing.

See you around the forum!
PS I’m currently living in Melbourne, recently of Portland Oregon US.

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Hi Rasmus,

I’ve been going to FOSSASIA since 2015 and remember your talk! Great to see you here! btw, we have a design track since 2016 at FOSSASIA, and as @simonv3 mentioned it will be 4th time at FOSDEM this year!

For FOSDEM’18 CFP is open already: http://opensourcedesign.net/events/2018/02/04/opensourcedesign-fosdem-2018

Just in case if you are interested ))

Hi Nicky,
Great you mentioned this! One of the topic we discuss here and offline is how UX research and design methods can be integrated into development, especially open and distributed!

Hi Victoria,

That does sound quite interesting… Looks like I could make it on that date, too. Are you coordinating topics somehow?

Rasmus

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