Here are the meeting notes of our meeting on 02 July 2025. It took me some more time than expected, but eventually here it is!
Introduction
- For motivation see former posts in this thread: there is low level of activity on this forum. However, this does not reflect a lack of commitment.
- The website should be a tool what we want. That it does not work might reflect a lot about our organization. Does this group have a strong opinion about what they want to do? Provocation: Pick 1 thing and go for it!
- Existing goals and code of conduct on the website are 10 years old and probably out of date. Reflect: What has or hasn’t worked. What did we write down? What would we change?
Community strategy, website goals
- connecting designers with other designers
- connecting designers with OSS developers
- helping people find things
- This should be retained: People should not get commoditized.
What has worked?
- Events
- Job board
- Discourse forum (to some extend)
- Transparency
- Supporting OSS
- We do not sell or offer services.
What has not worked?
- Website
- Discourse (some topics)
Website issues
- Much content, but missing focus and structure
- What is the focus? What is this? What aspects of design is covered? Maybe a glossary.
- Navbar has a lot of options, but it is unclear that the forum might be the place to go next.
- It’s not connecting designers with projects but telling what OSD is doing.
- Events subpage is confusing. We used to link to all sorts of events that had some relation.
- The website does not invoke: “Submit your stuff here”.
- Maybe we have given the impression what we “produce”. Resources and jobs might enforce that.
Discourse forum issues
- Purely informational posts, not requiring interaction
- Meta stuff (like community and website redesign), that didn’t raise OSS maintainer’s interest.
Basic solution
- Website for content to provide
- Highlighting what goes on. We were not thought as “we produce” but more of a “banner people gather under”. Not rewrite stuff for OSD but signal where they are.
- Do we be a more social space? matching designers with developers [as pivoting the job board in that direction]. That takes a lot of maintaining
- Mastodon account to post about 1-2 good things once a week what we found from OSD community.
- People don’t come to us; we need to go to them. Auto posting.
Website content
What
- Bringing attention to OSS + Design + UX + highlighting what is happening about OSS + design
- OSD could be a showcase of what people do in OSD.
- Positive things in open source
- 3/4 pillars - Curated social posts, Jobs reposting, Education/Collaboration
- Archive much of the existing stuff.
- What could a good format be? Initiation people to create these lists of resources/papers/responses/mastodon posts - what is the least effort usability improvements for OSS projects. Prompts that are collections of insights.
- Collections of how designers ‘do’ a certain aspect in OSS.
- Invoke: “Submit your stuff here”
What not
- Resources. Anything that is a collection of resources will age and provoke discussions about why something is that way.
- Projects
- Sell or offer services. This should be retained: People should not get commoditized.
Curated social posts
- Tech question - we seem to go down this ‘go to social media’ as a backbone - pull that feed and put on website so it’s a focused place. And have a feeds section, jobs section, (education section) and it being filterable.
- pulling feed from mastodon should be relatively easy at least via JavaScript?
- How much do we want to “roll our own” or build on existing tools
Education
- We could be a space for community education. This is what FOSDEM is. [JAN: maybe put/links talks on website?]
- Link prominently to FOSDEM talks
- Can we have a catalogue for the top 50 talks for OSD
- A collection of educational blog posts (like [Medium website|(medium.com)) for OSD?
Jobs
- Be more of a jobs board rather than ask for contributions. Currently designers compete for projects; not ideal, collaborating would be better.
- Maybe with a jobs specific section, considering not maintaining jobs pages, just resharing? Every organization can provide its own posting [we just share/spread]
- Could we offer a vetting process for job postings - OSS org contacts us with ‘I’ve got a job’ and we triage and then re-share and post. Bring extra focus to jobs that look well considered and done.
- at least nudge people to better structured posts
Events subpage
- Keep events, but show fewer events and be clearer (=less confusing)
Archive existing content, keep URLs
- Deleting stuff from old website: resources in an archive, removing resources from the navbar, keep the URLs for links from people who have externally linked to those sections.
- Create something like a soft fork that is not burdened by old stuff.
Social Media
- People are living on social spaces like Mastodon.
- That encourages more interaction in a place where everyone else is - a collective of 5 people (with an editor) who are involved in ‘this is a good link’ with this drip of 1-2 good things once a week – I (Scott?) will offer something - OSD as an editorial focus of what is happening in open-source design.
- Engagement = Outside of website on social platform
- Who of us replies etc. on social media?
- How to deal with hate comments on mastodon - increasing risk of such things. Not post without comment and curation.
Content
- Positive things in open source
- Form to post via a form on our mastodon. Put in header of mastodon account and then one person goes through and posts them. Form asks what category this is etc. etc. [we need to find a form for that]
Next steps
- Define roles in a text document
- Who of us replies etc. on social media?
- Who gets to participate in decisions? people should involve themselves. Somehow
Action Points
- Scott: to create/source OSS forms – done, see above
- Sven: add notes to the strategy document
- Eriol: Talk to core team about what was discussed in the meeting via signal + email and prompt folks to respond (?)