Monthly Open Source Design call

Open Source Design meta Monthly call
132

April 6th 2022 Call

Intros

Anybody have topics they want to discuss?

  • Two folks wanted to ask about: Experiences of us as open source designers in the community with tools and processes and fixing UI problems? or “Tell us a story about a successful interaction between your design work on an OSS project where you had to collaborate/communicate with engineers” and the inverse (a negative interaction). "

  • Eriol told a story about doing Exploratory research in Open Food Network

  • Jan told a story about… (sorry @jdittrich I fully lost my notes on this!) but also wrote: this write-up: https://www.fordes.de/posts/CulturesUXOpenSource.html

  • Bernard told a story about contributing mermaid graphs to Joplin: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/6100

  • Matthew told a story about working with technical devs (I think I got this right but please correct if not!)

  • Comments in the chat:

    • “give us wireframes” ← When OSS asks for this not always a good ask! follow up question of: Do they ask for “wireframes” without any other discussions?
    • i think a lot of the product development approaches for mvps or even launches are development first
    • customer support: indeed, great source!
    • Did their job posting say “Design Wizard” maybe?
    • These conversations are also a direct reflection of where Design “sits” in the project or organization. If Design comes in from the top of the project (founder/referred “wizard” or “sorceress”), then the pain is a bit different.
    • Interesting point of view since there is some research on projects being hostile towards design and HCI because they are not doing “Real contributions”
      Steffen Kotschi says: There is a beautiful example of I think it was handbrake, where usability issues were closed because it’s an expert application and users are supposed to be able to handle bad UX in this context
    • there is always some truth in that statement, since design mafia often treat design like a holy grail
    • Design can definitely put itself on a pedestal or create an ivory tower situation.

  • Saptak recommended: https://sosdesign.sustainoss.org/18 might have some good insights where we talked about developer and designer contribution

  • Eriol Recommended: I did a mini casual talk about onboarding designers in some of the projects I worked in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6IVuWoz3H8&t=516s

Fellowships/Internships for Designers (+Developer!) in FLOSS

Action points and to dos

  • @Erioldoesdesign Draft a form for FLOSS projects to tell us what they might ask a designer (+Developer) for during an internship period.

    • Be sure to ask about roughly what tasks they want done
    • Be sure to ask what time frame they’d want the fellow/intern for
    • Not too long a form!
    • On OSD’s Nextcloud

  • Consider a survey also for designers about how/what they want from an internship/fellowship in FLOSS

  • @Erioldoesdesign Invite Sage to May’s call ← Done!

  • @Erioldoesdesign Find a time that works between interested folks from Simply Secure & @jdittrich and other fellow/intern interested folks

  • @Erioldoesdesign and @ei8fdb and @SaptakS to find time to do a ‘hack day’ with a spreadsheet and go through all known internship/fellowship FLOSS programs and make a ‘matrix’ of what happens in these typically and what we think we want to leverage.

  • FOSDEM + FOSSBackstage + Mozfest + other? articles/summaries from these conferences need writing!

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