Hello everyone,
My name is Aras Atasaygin. I’m a developer/designer from Dubai. I released http://openlogos.org/ last week and Jan-Christoph Borchardt invited me to this community.
Hope to help your initiative as much as I can.
Have anice weekend.
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Welcome Aras!
Very nice to have you here. Your Openlogos look great. Really beautiful. I hope they are all claimed soon!
I’d love to hear about the user-centred design and open source software communities in Dubai. I went to Duba and Abu Dhabi a number of times for a work project in 2016-2017.
When I was researching the UX community there, I only found a small number of people. There was a MeetUp group but it wasn’t active. Has that changed?
Best wishes!
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Hi!
I’m Avi, a UX design-lead and an entrepreneur from Tel Aviv, Israel (AKA “The Startup Nation” 
).
Until recently I worked for Microsoft Israel (R&D Center) as the UX Lead for our Cyber-Security division, and also lead / helped to internal incubation and disruptive-innovation projects.
In the last 10 years, before joining Microsoft, I worked at Cisco and NDS. But I’ve also worked in small companies, consulted and mentored Startups, and even founded my own Startup.
I’ve also founded StartUX - a HUB for Innovation, Start-ups, Technology, Social media and Networking. And since I write about UX/UI and open design, recently I even switched to Linux!
BTW, I’ve been following OSD for a while now, as I’m promoting open-source design / awareness in the Israeli design-community. Looking forward!
Best,
Avi
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Oh cool!
Yeah we ran 2 weeks of field research at the end of last year in Nairobi and Kisumu, Kenya. The work Will and David were probably referring to was the group of participatory design sessions we did with 5-or-so partner NGOs based in Nairobi who all work on HIV/AIDS prevention for adolescent girls and young women. The goal was to understand where the Ushahidi Platform fits into their current processes, data flows, etc., as well as beginning to understand the unique contexts of their beneficiaries. For example, most of them don’t own smartphones, many share a feature phone with their family, some have their own SIM card that they swap in and out of a shared phone. It’s a super fascinating/challenging context to build tech for. I wrote about it a bit here: https://medium.com/ushahidi/hello-bias-my-old-friend-93ae5f8c41af
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Hey @ei8fdb
Thanks for the kind words. I’m living in Dubai for the past 2 years. Design and open source communities here is pretty small as you mentioned. I can only compare with Istanbul though.
Dubai is developing really fast and I think in a couple of years this place will become a big player in these fields. Especially in data science, I see successful teams and meetups more regularly.
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Hello world! 
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Hello OSD world! I’ve read every reply to this thread and am amazed with all the different kind of people gathered around FOSS design! I believe there is much potential in diversity.
I am a Florianópolis - Brasil (Brazil for non-brazilians) based graphic/web designer and HTML/CSS dev, starting to move towards front and backend JS too. Been using Ubuntu since version 7.10 in 2008 while still in highschool. From there I got to learn basic programming with shellscript and use GIMP/Inkscape.
Just graduated from colege where my final paper/project was a university medicinal herbs website redesign and prototype using FOSS (paper here and prototype here, both in portugese). In the final chapter I evaluate the use of FOSS throughout the whole process.
Found OSD last year in my paper researches about open source design and subscribed to the jobs mailing list. Recently got in touch for a job with @elioqoshi from Ura Creative witch was an amazing experience.
Right now I am working at a regular commercial design/webdev local company and working on bulding a local/national comunity around FOSS and design. Any tips on that are welcome!
It is a pleasure to be here with ya’ll. May we build tha best we can toghether. 
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Hey @eupiteco. I run a similar business in the United States (https://freehive.com). We almost exclusively use FOSS for 3D, graphics, and web design. I am currently creating a public knowledge base to share the tools and methods we use in order to help others copy what is useful. The skeleton of that site will be complete prior to a presentation I’m giving at the Gnome Libre Application Summit later this week. I’ll post a link on the forum here.
You should reach out to the people at Estudio Gunga (http://www.estudio.gunga.com.br/) in Brasilia and the two artists at Pixellado (https://www.pixellado.com/) also in Brasil who share your vision. There is a very strong FOSS community in Brasil. Welcome!
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Thanks Ryan! I am already in touch with the Gunga folks, unfortunatelly Brasilia is too far away for a in-person meeting in the near future (about 1600km/1000mi) but there is always the internet 
Didin’t knew about Pixelado, will reach’em for sure!
Also I love emojis 
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Hi, good to be part of this awesome community.
I am a UX Designer and i am seeing this platform to teach me stuff and contribute to it in return. Hope this journey will make the world of design better.
Cheers!
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Hi all,
I’m Kris. I’m a designer at Discourse. I’ve been a part-time freelancer with them since 2013, and joined the team full-time a year ago. I’m generally interested in getting more designers participating in OSS projects and better understanding what barriers may be preventing them from doing so.
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Hello everyone,
I’m a product designer with a great insight in service design who is looking to contribute skills for people who have a great vision and are willing to help others with their creations.
I have been part of multiple native mobile app development teams and web agency setups building apps and web for finance/health/education etc fields. In my free time I create identities, play around with html/css and take photos in my hiking trips around the country.
I have NO EXP IN OPEN SOURCE. 
Looking forward to get one! 
Cheers,
Mārtiņš
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Hi all,
I’ve just joined the open source forum. I’m bringing together a bunch of thinking about how people can be using technology in the future through what can best be described as ‘Mixed Reality’. Or, more accurately, where the real world is both the display and user interface, populated also with virtual artifacts and characters.
From a design perspective, I’m interested in how we design the new language of this medium applying the best ‘calm technology’ principles, with an understanding of cognitive science informing our definitions of how technology is built to fit in and support people in natural and intuitive ways.
So, that’s the path I am heading down, and I’m keen to do this in an opensource and open thinking manner.
On the other side of the coin, we’re reinventing the underlying operating system structures to best support this new way of thinking.
/Roy.
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Hello everybody!
My name is Felipe. I am an interaction designer and SW engineer.
I work at Terranet AB, a Swedish R&D company focused on proximity and mesh networks; i.e. getting devices to do nifty things by talking to each other directly. I find use cases for particular technology (e.g. WiFi Aware) and bring them to life through functional prototypes, driving the development of the underlaying building blocks in the process.
Previously I was a SW engineer at Igalia for several years, developing applications and libraries for the Maemo/MeeGo mobile systems and the GNOME desktop environment.
Kind regards,
Felipe
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Hey everyone, I’m Anja and i am part of Ura Design as a SysAdmin.
I got familiar with the OSD world in the summit held in Tirana this year, and the atmosphere was amazing. Looking forward to meeting many of you. 
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Hi!
My name is Juan Duarte, i’m a Graphic Designer from Brazil and i work mainly with branding. I recently entered in the “open source world” and i want to be more engaged in the activism and community.
Today i’m a contributor of the InkScape’s Team Vectors, and i’m trying to help with all i can do and learn.
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Alô Juan! Saudações do Brasil
I think we might keep it in english so everyone can understand our conversation here 
If you haven’t already, check the @ryangorley reply to my introduction here, he pointed two great studios that use FOSS tools here.
Abraços!
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Hello!
My name is Antonela. I’m a Product Designer. I’m currently leading the UX team at the Tor Project. We work on things like Tor Browser for desktop, Tor Browser for Android and the Tor Project website.
I’m happy to be here and excited to meet some of you in FOSDEM this year!
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Hi all!
I’m Cristina. I’m a designer and frontend dev working on Drupal based in Barcelona. I’m one of the coordinators for the Drupal Admin UI Modernisation initiative and I’d love to get in contact with more designers from the Open Source world. I’ll try to see which events are the ones I can find some of you (sadly not FOSDEM this year).
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