In preparation for today’s Monthly Design Call, I have created the template on the event page according to @Erioldoesdesign 's suggestion. If you are interested, please feel free to make improvements. Maybe someone can also pin my post to the top of the new thread, as I’m not familiar with it yet.
For tonight, I would be interested to know where we are with this project, who is active (perhaps in the background) for which part and what we can tackle next to create a vibrant community that further anchors the UX idea in the open source world.
I’m gladly looking forward to seeing you this evening.
Minutes from the Design Community Call on June 5, 2024:
Participants:@SvenPu, Otto Richter from the Codeberg project
Notes:
Today I had the chance to welcome a new participant to our monthly meeting call: Otto Richter from the Codeberg project. We both are from Germany, which made our communication a little bit easier. Some members here might have seen and talked to him at this year’s FOSS Backstage conference in Berlin.
Otto introduced the Codeberg project, which is a code hosting platform similar to Github or Gitlab. Codeberg is trying to build a better user experience, e. g. for designers. (Which designer does not know about the problem of comparing two versions of an image, etc.?!)
To achieve this, Codeberg is reaching out to designers, for instance, to conduct user research or design tasks. They’re so grateful for their contributions!
We discussed topics that repeatedly occur in software development projects at the intersection of requirements, design and development, e. g. different points of view of users, developers and designers and approaches to make them more understandable to each other.
I found this a positive discussion and invited Otto into our community. Hopefully, we can welcome him here soon.
For our next meeting on 3 July 2024, I’d love to see some more participants again and get to know more about where we are with our community. Who is active (perhaps in the background) for which part and what we can tackle next to build up a vibrant community that further anchors the UX idea in the open source world?
@scottjenson mentioned, that he tried to join the meeting on Wednesday at 19:00 CET by opening meet.jit.si/opensourcedesign, but no one was there. As far as I can tell there were also some technical problems when Otto and I joined. I don’t know how long Scott waited in the room - it would not be the first time that Jitsi meeting participants in the same room did not see each other. From my experience, the only way around this is to leave and join again. Let’s hope it did not happen to more people and that it works better next time.
Scott, if there are any issues that you brought up that you wanted to discuss at the meeting, please feel free to discuss them in this forum so that we can all share our thoughts.
Hey @SvenPu Thanks for hosting the calls lately - I’ve been on vacation (much needed!) I’ll be around for the July call :)))
I hope Jitsi issues get resolved. The Monthly call i think has always been described as a drop in- drop out and so some folks may not show up every month or on time every month.
Hello everyone, due to time constraints I probably won’t be able to attend the meeting today. Is anyone else attending and can look after our community and the new participants? Thank you and best regards, Sven
Needs an update! Eriol has sent a message to Core team to refresh
Topics!
Some of the best designers are Engineers.
Penpot, first time using and found it really great
How are others experiences
Constructing libraries are difficult with how things are connected and meta data etc.
Better than the older times
license metadata is pretty bad overall. There were some attempts in the CC hype in the early 2000s.
UI building and bugs. Flex layout is tricky and collaborating across designers is hard.
Auto layout is also hard in Figma
Design and development - should it have this abstract development model behind it? re. handoff.
Just in case anyone does need flexbox help, https://flexboxfroggy.com/ is still probably the easiest way to learn or brush up on your skills.
Playfulness is missing in adult pedagogy
When you don’t write the content it’s also tricky
We had some low fi problems
That also feels like a typical human trait… low-fi design = low-fi feedback
Using the lowest-fidelity possible (sticky notes, sharpies and paper, even) is often a great way to save time and create a lot of clarity in design work.
Sharing options in penpot are teams based which is quite restrictive. They think you have a consistent team and only share with them vs. an open sharing re.
Talks at Gnome conf
Prototyping talk to the community - share the topic
We could do so much more in desktop and we’ve over indexed on Mobile.
Doing more research on connectivity between devices
Proposing 3-4 things to research and encourage small teams to build prototypes and write papers.
CPU - saving phone usage for some things can help. The desktop should be fast, do the important stuff fats and the extra stuff can take more time. Re. raspberry pies trying to do so many things.
Lots of research to do with Assistive tech. Most of the latest gnome developments have hindered capacities of them.
OSS has some nostalgia for the old ways of doing tech. What could a computer be for creating things (in the 90s) now computers are for consumption.
If we really want the entire world to use more FOSS, we need to get beyond our current demographic.
I imagine you’re already thinking about it, but framing your thesis around a particular segment/demographic/role/persona might be crucial in making sure people in your audience don’t misinterpret. Otherwise your audience might start forming a counter-argument in their head as you’re speaking (eg, “my usual target audience is developers, and they’re not coding on mobile”).
And secondly, operating system/input-output/hardware advancement on desktop/laptop machines vs mobile devices is also driven by capitalism. If it isn’t profitable to improve the desktop experience (compared in priority at least to cellphones for example) then desktop/laptop UX improvements are going to be difficult to execute on, even if you do research/protoype/design a successful next-best-thing.
Literacy or how people learn via a support environment - connecting learning/reading in a different space.
Did some quick Open Source Design core updates re. Open Collective, Forum copy paste strikes and what new issues and contributions have been made lately!
Our monthly community call is today @ 2024-09-04T17:00:00Z→2024-09-04T18:00:00Z but sadly I have a terrible migraine so can’t facilitate
If anyone else can take on facilitation that’d be amazing and don’t forget to take notes here!
We had a small call; no big updates. We talked about the situation of designers in open source projects (See here for an overview of academic texts) as well as some ideas on “my” UI sketching tool (see here for slides)
I’ll be around for today’s call! I just finished PyCon India, where I gave a keynote on my NumPy comics. I also hosted a zine making workshop as an Unconference session, and over 30 people showed up! The workshop focused on encouraging people to ‘Tell their Open Source Story’ and get crafty with pen and paper as a break from the usual conference stuff.
And met Saptak, who is convincing me to join FOSDEM next year haha.
Talking about communities, mastodon and the question whether Reddit is “social media”
Jan giving a brief update on what is going on in the community:
Preparing application for FOSDEM room
Whether we get a room or not (so far our applications were successful, fingers crossed), some people might start planning for travel.
With FOSSDEM coming we also need to talk about funding traveling and other questions of governance. Also: Jan’s “What could OSD to for you-question”
Some general discussion
What is OSDs goal?
Some projects barely manage to have unit tests (a rather dev-ish practice), this makes it kinda hard for us to suggest “hey, you should be doing some user research”
A lot of designers don’t know a lot about engineering. This makes interaction hard; the gap is not bridged.
Interestingly it has not been always this way in all communities: Smalltalk programming took a strong interest in design.
The first paper about patterns in engineering was about UI patterns in collaborative design with non-programmers in smalltalk and preceeds the famous “Gang of Four” design patterns book by 7 years.
what would we like to see in FOSS projects to work with them?
Hi Team, I’m new here. I’m researching different design-related learning communities and would love to learn more about what is happening in this community. Is this call open to everyone? Where can we get the meeting link? Thank you!
Some members here might have seen and talked to him at this year’s FOSS Backstage conference in Berlin.
