Monthly Open Source Design call

Thx for adding headlines :bouquet:

Interesting! Did you identify/suggest any patterns?
I mostly answered some general questions they had on how ‘different’ (if at all) an open source design process is to commercial design and detailed my experiences across a few projects. Went with three typical scenarios I’ve observed re. doing OSS design:

  1. Very async, no or little designer collaboration, you create issues (or others do) and you contribute to these in isolation, solo and async. Little to no designer involvement through ‘the development pipe’ and design is essential ‘airdropped in’

  2. The above but designer is more generally involved and communicative on issues and generally about the software.

  3. A design ‘pipe’ is begun and follows into a development pipe of some kind. Designers collaborate and work as a ‘design team’ but openly and without hierarchy and ‘control’ and the design + dev is through trust, discussion and collab with designers and devs in the project.

The chat was a little more complicated than that because there are so many variations on what you can do. Mostly the Jamulus team wanted to understand how OSS design differs from ‘regular design’ and I just kind of said ‘It can be a little unstructured and chaotic and you spend a lot of time communicating and advocating the design side. It’s also a longer commitment than you think’

how designers come to contribution

This was in relation to a brief discussion on the amount of designers interested in the OSS policy and structure side of OSD and those that are more interested in OSD from a ‘I can get real life exp on tech projects for my design portfolio but also do something meaningful with that time and learn’

I’ve certainly seen a split between these two with the ‘OSS policy and structures persona’ being less common!