Reminder for folks!
Our monthly community call will happen at 2025-02-05T18:00:00Z→2025-02-05T19:00:00Z 7pm CET over on Jitsi. meet.jit.si/opensourcedesign
Check out the events page here: Open Source Design monthly call - Open Source Design
Our public calendar here: Open Source Design
Open Source Design Community call 2025-02-05T19:00:00Z→2025-02-05T20:00:00Z
We all said hello 
5 6 of us!
New community member and their work: Estúdio Gunga (@estudiogunga) • Instagram photos and videos
penpot (and like tools) have a scary Uncle showing up:
Added to my calendar, see you next month.
Hello folks! the monthly meeting will be 2025-03-05T18:00:00Z→2025-03-05T19:00:00Z we meet in this room Jitsi Meet and you don’t have to wait for any ‘moderator’ to start the call - just enter and start chatting/hanging out - if someone takes notes and posts here that’d be lovely 
I sadly can’t be there tomorrow but i hope y’all who attend have a wonderful and fruitful conversation 
Our monthly community call is today at 2025-04-02T17:00:00Z→2025-04-02T18:00:00Z
We meet in a voice/video call using Jitsi at meet.jit.si/opensourcedesign
see you there!
Summary in very short bullet points:
and since we talked about “cannibalism as a metaphor for love on open source”, here my reference to the mentioned “cannibalism as a not-just-metaphor” in David Graebers “Debt”, Ch.6, setion of “Flesh Debt (Tiv)”.
Hey folks, the community call is tomorrow at 2025-05-07T17:00:00Z→2025-05-07T18:00:00Z
Sadly i cannot make it but I will be advocating for Open Source Design over at the Maintainer month events. Is anyone intending on joining the OSD call?
Sadly, I don’t know if I will have internet at the time 
That’s unfortunate to hear. Even though I’m on vacation, I had considered joining the call after a long absence to address the questions I raised in this thread: Website and Services Review and Future Steps.
Since I noticed that two key contributors are not present today, I kindly ask you and anyone interested to continue that discussion there. I still believe that our vision and goals hold great value and have a positive impact on the software community, making it essential to actively support them.
I know that we all have personal commitments that keep us busy. Let’s take a moment to assess our current situation and explore how we can pursue our vision with the resources we have available.
Best,
Sven
in a unique twist of events! i can now make the call so I’ll hang out and see if folks show up
Notes from 2025-05-06T23:00:00Z 's monthly community call
Not much traffic in the forum - whats happening in OSD
How do we show the public part?
What is the forum for? more private discussion
Design twitter moved to linkedin but a lot of people moved those conversations have moved there.
What do we want (the community) from the forum? comms strategies
opensourcedesign/opensourcedesign.github.io · Discussions · GitHub
Social medias See Open Source Design’s activity on LinkedIn
Internship process
Icon design job requests
So many open and free icon libraries why to people ask for icons on jobs
We can decide to not merge PR requests for icons that are served by icon libraries and then instead of merging the PR we suggest where they can find open icons and then come back if those don’t meet the needs they have
Can we open design office hours - 1-2-1 time.
Scott might want to add an article re. his office hours time
How can we help them in the space in-between icons and entire re-factor of the project
Can we build user personas for OSS projects?
Do we want to do our own things or more with the website
Eriol described the current looser structure on how to move our objectives forward as a ‘collective’ rather than a group that sets a roadmap
From time to time people come in and we welcome them and then nothing happens anymore.
Can i find guidance (as a developer) and find help/solutions
How do we lower the barrier? guide to interesting topics and take hand and ask what they would like and need?
What do we want to offer and how do we offer it in a way that keeps us engaged too!
What has been successful? what has not been successful?
How do we do that? can we be more effective?
What makes a forum ‘go’ and discuss things? either from outside or from the inside - OSS isn’t as popular a topic and partly it’s BAU.
There’s a lot going on but it’s for insiders?
In this group, can we get coherance on that
there’s also an expectation of immediacy, of urgency… that’s a trickle-pulse on the current site, part tech, and part human (ie commitment to reply in short order). Not easy to solve for.
Newsletter? or a way to gatehr the current things in OSD land?
Yes and?
Should we be on social media more?
yeah, I think with no tweetdeck equivalent I don’t post a lot there.
newsletters = agree, potent. the best ones SHOW things (what’s been shipped).
But getting the mastodon going could be cool.
https://librearts.org/ does something like this
sven talked about offering a place where foss devs can go if they had questions. I said that my experience is that in many projects are underresourced and “any designer on the internet” can’t easily consider their concerns in the context of what can be done in their project.
Internership project progress: Open Source Design Internship project - Google Docs
Thank you, @Erioldoesdesign, for recording the minutes and to everyone for taking the time.
I would also like to thank the meeting participants for the insightful discussion and for addressing my questions.
It is now clearer to me that our community, though small, remains active and dedicated to our shared goals. The low level of activity on this forum does not reflect a lack of commitment. We discussed possible reasons and future approaches, including using social media platforms (LinkedIn, BlueSky, Mastodon) to foster more dynamic and timely interactions.
It is important to note that Open Source Design is not a tightly managed project with a fixed roadmap, clearly defined roles, or set deadlines. Instead, it is a loosely knit community of volunteers who contribute as they see fit, provided their efforts align with our goals and do not disrupt existing work.
Here’s my understanding—please feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken.
To better achieve our objectives, we aim to reflect on what has worked well in recent years and what hasn’t, and then consider how to move forward more effectively. We hope to discuss these reflections at the next meeting.
For those unfamiliar with the abbreviation “BAU” (like myself), it stands for “business as usual”.
It is important to note that this interpretation regarding interest in Open Source Software may vary depending on perspective and industry. From my point of view, Open Source Software (OSS) has gained significant momentum in recent years, particularly within the German government. This shift undeniably required (and still requires) a change in mindset.
An example is the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein, which is actively pursuing digital sovereignty by transitioning to Open Source Software. For more information, see the Open Innovation and Open Source Strategy of Land Schleswig-Holstein [PDF, available in English and German].
Additionally, OpenCode, a German platform dedicated to Digital Sovereignty, has been promoting the adoption of Open Source within the German public sector for several years.
It is evident that interest in Open Source software remains strong and continues to grow.
At the same time, there are still many usability and UX challenges to address, highlighting the ongoing need for design work and guidance. Perhaps our community can have a positive impact here.
Here are some ideas that (inspired what Sven said and wrote) I would find worth considering:
This - i think people are active in other spaces and might prefer chatting in more ‘casual’ spaces than a forum, which can feel quite ‘formal’.
I do think there’s some effort that can be made in order to understand how open source design as a community meets the expectations of what the evolving populations of open source designers want/need.
For example, I’ve been speaking a lot across south east asian countries like Japan and Taiwan and helping those communities reach designers. They have an energy and enthusiasm that i don’t see as much in the USA and across western europe. But i would also like to understand better what the ‘state of designers’ is like generally globally - are designers so focussed on new technologies that open source contribution is becoming less and less viable as a use of spare time? is focussing on companies that use OSS as dependancies that have design teams worth investing energy in to find sustainable contributors?
I have many questions!
Monthly meeting 2025-06-04T17:00:00Z→2025-06-04T18:00:00Z
Agenda
Intros & framing
Updates on internship process
See the in progress document here! Open Source Design Internship project - Google Docs
F-Droid is very responsive and communicative and energetic about having an Open Source Design Intern funded by us.
We talk through the two projects on the table - core mobile UI improvements or Android TV.
“paid design intern” = good!
Q: is there a guesstimate on hourly rate?
summer of code stipend:
Talked a bit about the structure of the project, phases of a ‘good’ design’ project. So it’s also a good example for other projects
Dev + Designer to work together on the same things. Start at the same time, research on respective areas. So they don’t get split up
Q: is the individual already decided or will it become open for applications once the scope is defined?
Next steps are: the Jan + Julia + Eriol team refine project, talk $$'s and then figure out how to promo.
Please offer you time and energy if you want to:
Weaknesses of community voting - a salient point was raised that community voting was done by many, but the work to make the choice happen was done by few and many of those that voted are no longer around in energy/time/effort.
What are we as a community, how do we want to progress, and what can we do to make this community more powerful and increase our impact?
This topic did ‘kick off’ this topic last meeting
We have a ‘what can you do?’ article/thread? or update this Contributing document
Sven shared a list/document of what we are currently doing.
This looks to:
Areas of interest/maintenance
Reactions:
What has worked so far should be sooner - to be less about unachievable cool ideas and more grounded in reality. Let’s not add more difficulties
Happy to bend some company (human) resources to help add to the person power.. eg supporting the intern, support at backstage etc
Do some research! How do we combine that without denying the ‘political’ part of it. We have good social reach and it would be good to get a better grasp on this - maybe a survey.
^ yes and to the above re. FOSDEM could be a place to do research and also have a session and use the travel fund for whomever leads the work
Next steps:
EF: Get Sven an Nextcloud invite if he wants! - Done
EF & JD: Can pin a discourse thread once Sven creates. @SvenPu send this post once it’s up to either me or @jdittrich
Clean up website and github?
Moved to next meeting!
Whats up in the world of Canonical?
A month ago we our head of design moved on, open design component has become a core part of the design dept moving forwards.
We can dedicate more resources to that.
Loughborough Uni - students working on industry projects - world of Open Design. How could designers contribute better to OSS? https://www.figma.com/slides/EOGDZRdfqFPINi7sPE77Vj/F416529-24DSP811-CW1?node-id=1-112&t=vhxKyql0ykW2hGIT-0
Students have reached out post project - how can I help more?
This is gonna be supported by Canonical - 5 people supporting/being supported
A couple of folks to look at who’ve done similar things: McGill uni researcher Jazlyn Hellman did work on this and so did Rozhan Hozhabri Nezhad from , Jan BC, Eriol doing some lectures in Japan
Communities to collab.
Many members in further east timezones cannot make the regular CET/EST time - we are thinking of reviving the IST time zone meeting. Calendar hereOpen Source Design
New PR: https://github.com/opensourcedesign/jobs/pull/955
Eriol has started a Substack newsletter link collection doc hereand also a wikipedia entry
Eriol is helping this person try to get their job live via email PR here they were adding a personal cloud space to download an install file for their OSS for. We should have a clear rule that all OSS projects that want to post on our jobs board must have fully viewable public open source code to avoid any security problems/malware.
https://contribute.design/ also see the forum post here: Welcoming designers to oss with contribute.design
Project for Software Attestations: UI/UX support for attestations on software repos · GitHub
Apologies I am trying to find the latest schedule for upcoming talks? I’ve scrolled back up till october but don’t see it, maybe I missed it? Apologies again for my ignorance.
Hey folks - reminder that today is community call day! 2025-07-02T17:00:00Z→2025-07-02T18:00:00Z