yey! Topics could be (just what goes through my mind)
- Call for participation: Goals for our website
- Blender with their using your own app for design/art project
- If people try quick wire and give some feedback, I’d be happy.
I propose:
- continuation of the community strategy topic (see discussion thread)
- Eriol’s substack newsletter (I can’t access it) and wikipedia entry (IMHO ready to go)
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For my action item, as it was so easy, I just did something in LimeSurvey (Sorry Juhan) and it wasn’t that bad at all. It’s currently only in test form and the tone/questions are all up for debate, but it’s pretty easy to change: http://tiny.cc/osd_suggestion
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I’m all for using it.
Just touched a latent nerve.
Glad the service is humming.
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I did a quick test of your survey, see my test report.
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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- Existing goals and code of conduct on the website are 10 years old and probably out of date.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 (?)
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One additional thought I had after our meeting.
To (1) make it easier for non-English speakers to follow the discussion and (2) take the note-taking burden from us: how about using a real-time notetaking AI to take notes, subtitle and summarize our conversation in real-time? As first ideas Fireflies.ai and Jitsi AI notetaker come to my mind, but as the AI solution market (incl. OSS) is very dynamic, there might also be better tools for it.
What do you think about it?
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We had a short call today.
Next time, we want to talk about improving and changing the content of the website. See here for creating a content repository to do that and which topics we talked about before.
I’m in the jitsi room Jitsi Meet and no moderator is showing up?
I wanted to join as well. Would it make sense to modify the room settings so that everyone can start the meeting? I am not familiar with Jitsi, but always use this option for my BigBlueButton meetings to allow self-organized community meetups, or allowing participants to start smalltalk when a moderator is late.
(The opportunity could also be used to flip the default to webcam + microphone disabled, as I find it somewhat awkward not being able to join the meeting without refusing these things first. Having these things opt-in makes a lot of sense in my eyes)
I’m giving up. I like Otto’s suggestion though. Seems very “un open source” to gate the meeting on a moderator 
@Erioldoesdesign just joined.
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not our choice jitsi’s infrastructure choice
Fair enough, is it possible to have multiple moderators? It’s not fair to put all the pressure on you.
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I had the impression (maybe wrongly) that the first person to come can appoint themselves to be the moderator, since I have been moderator in the past, too afaic.
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any notes from yesterday?
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Yep! this is true - I double checked the jitsi documentation and it just needs a person (doesn’t have any special logins/permissions assign by OSD) to login to jitsi and assume the moderator role. Any community member who arrives first and is willing to do the login process should be able to become the moderator.
We didn’t end up talking about any of the actions from previous meetings tbh but the tl;dr of what we spoke about was:
- Otto brought his challenges in trying to gather a design team to contribute to forgejo. There was lots of interest from designers to contribute, including interest from this forum etc. but then when it came to the first organised online meeting nobody showed up. We then discussed the difficulties in builing out a ‘team’ of designers to volunteer contributions and Otto is going to try to build a team before choosing what OSS to contribute to, to see if this is a more successful order of ops.
- Then a person from code for austin arrived and spoke about their work in civic tech etc.
- Then some other folks joined close to the finish time of the call.
- One question that was asked that was pretty familiar as a core member is ‘what does open source design do as an organisation?’ and I explained the current loose governance structure re. we are more of a collective than an organisation who take responsibility for programmtic activities etc.
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Hey folks 
I won’t be at the community call today. it starts at 19.00 CET in our regular jitsi room but i hope folks that do head there have a great time!
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Here my notes from todays call. I hope it correctly reflects what everyone said!
- Juhan: Would be great to have something about good open source desgin that, rather than talking about it, can be felt: Examples for software.
- Lisa: Gitlab has a lot of resources. But even there it is not clear how to be involved
- Jan: Featuring projects. I would not feature “great” examples (to controversial what makes something “great”), but just different open software where people are design-concerned.
- Sven: Like libre art world?
- Jan: Yes, like their more in-depth posts and interviews.
- Otto: Forgejo is a gitlab replacement. It can be very technical. I myself are sometimes overwhelmed by it. Tech people are overwhelmed with how to do good design and research. Resources: better condensed best practices for common interaction things.
- Jan: Going though it with heuristic research?
- Otto: Admin panel and content moderation would be topics.
- Sven(?): What is content moderation?
- Otto: Users should be able to report “bad” data. How can admins react to it? It is easy to learn about admin needs. How to present the information?
- Jan: We could sign up 2-n people doing an heuristic analysis, we would need a task description and an access to an instance where people can try it out. Nice about it that it could produce a case study
- Julia: There are also resources:📖 Link collection desi... | Knowledge Base
- Sven: Should we put this on our website`?
- Jan: The problem was that resources get stale… Maybe its better to create one of these “awesome …” pages?
- Julia: Could we set it up like the jobs, making it easy to set up?
- Jan: Yes, I think so. Either with some submit form or just using build in GitHub tools.
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