Thank you, @jdittrich , for your notes! Here are some additions I wrote down:
OSD on Mastodon ( Open Source Design (@opensourcedesign@mastodon.social) - Mastodon ) reports about news in the Open Source Design world (such as UX related news and design tools). If someone from us has interesting content, they can send it per DM to that account and Jan will post it.
Sven: We need to get into action. For next steps see the strategy document : set concrete long/mid/short term goals, define tasks, execute tasks
Next steps to get into action. They can be executed in parallel.
clarify, who our users are (such as developers seeking for UX guidance like @fnetX ), find out their needs and take them into account: all
collect ideas and tasks for next actions (for instance in the Github issue tracker). In our next meeting, we create an action plan from them: all
To get things forward, we don’t have to wait until the next call to discuss things, but can discuss them in our Discourse.
Next meeting:
Juhan: present a 300 second introduction to Seldon, an AI based design tool (see their website)
clarify the goal of the Monthly Design Calls (Julia’s question)
create action plan from collected issues
(Lisa: present website protoype)
I might have missed it in our next steps, but I find it noteworthy: @fnetX is seeking for practical design guidance. Otto: What next steps would be helpful from your point of view?
Addition to answer Julia’s question about this meeting’s goals: in my perception the meeting’s goal so far is to get and stay in contact with other open source design interested people, to exchange news and help or to just chat. To give it some more structure, I created a meeting agenda template in 2024.
I don’t know if I can participate in todays meeting, so here is whats on my mind
I made no progress on the website compared to last month (state then was: I ran jekyll, which still seems to be maintained and is supported by github, still). Suggestion for next steps: Text writing for front page, learning and participating in OSD. (Maybe in a live online co-working session?)
I finally watched the Audacity Redesign Video is is very good indeed. I also isolated some clips as examples for important UX concepts].
Spoke a little bit about the penpot talks and the vibes of the conf re. dev + designer collab and onboarding people as penpot users. Eriol spoke about how she spoke to many people about the history and practicalities of contributing to OSS as a designer.
How to contribute in open source in designer = i am totally confuse → Ritish on the call asked how to get started in contributing to OSS as a designer. Folks offered insight and advice.
A student asked us about how to find projects
Uphill battle but try to find projects that ask for design
Pick something you care about, use for your job, or care about, find a motivation
Same format as 2025, 3 talks (please suggest speakers), then suggesting discussion sessions, need more volunteers based in Berlin to help please! (email erioldoesdesign@gmail.com for details!)
They may ask OSD for funding for the venue costs again and they are also looking for a few more sponsors of between 1000 Euros and 3000 Euros - if you have funding or sponsorship money please consider sponsoring!
any other OS conferences (other than FOSDEM) that should be on our radar?
FOSSY USA 2026
All things open 2026
Come in, say hello: Who is here, some background information about ourselves (country/culture, profession, open source involvement - in what role?), wishes for this meeting and for our community (15 min)
We said hello and met Ritish the new person on the call.
How we are doing: (30 min.)
Things we are working on.
Forgjeo good news! more user research is happening
Positive things: What are some of the great things that have happened recently?
Money! website! FOSDEM!
The not-so-great stuff: What problems are we struggling with? What help do we need? What ideas do you have for solutions? How can we work together to make this happen?
Knowing how to get involved in OSS
About this meeting: (10 min.)
What went well for this meeting?
Well attended, good topics and chat!
What could we improve for the next meeting? What goes into the minutes and what doesn’t?
Having ‘new to OSS as a designer?’ links and text prepared!
Chit-chat - open end
OSD Jobs board feedback - need just 1 way for people to contact e.g. just email or just issues. It was hard to consolidate all comms methods.
Running jekyll, so one can try to create ones own prototype (or play with our current website)
Comments:
It would be potentially useful to have a search (@jdittrich agrees, it is probably difficult with a static site, except when using an external service)
Current website has multiple calls of action; its good that the box in Lisas prototype serves as a call for action: Here is things to learn about… here…
The website should have a “who we are”, to make sure it is not just seen as a "general explanation of design in FOSS). The current text on our site is not bad.
The homepage should fulfil two needs: 1) Knowing what is this? (i.e. what OSD is) And 2) “go here to…” (learn, participate)
Process being very slow, we should be more proactive. The worst thing would be rolling back a change
FOSSDEM
Talk reviews in progress
Canonical at FOSDEM
Reminders: Review last month for FOSDEM needs (volunteers!) and other Conferences: FOSS Backstage, FOSSY, All things open
Hi all I don’t usually join the calls but following passively with interest.
On this one: over at AntennaPod we also use Jekyll and we do have a documentation search. It’s basically JavaScript in combination with a json-based index (generated by Jekyll):
Hi all,
Here’s the prototype we’ve been discussing, now with Jekyll and on GitHub Pages. I also included the beginnings of an about page as we discussed. The content/design is WIP. This iteration primarily focused on creating a Jekyll theme using Claude Code. This is in my repo for now.
Notes from the community call on the 7th of Jan 2026
New topics for today’s agenda (5 min.)
New project look at - JanD trying to come up with content for a structure re. be involved in design and open sourceproject & join the Open Source Design.net organisation - JanD has been writing about this!
Progamming UI project JanD wants to share
Update from Lisa re. website Jekyll - Lisa
Angelo wants to also share details re. website updates - Angelo
Open Collective + money talk - Eriol
FOSDEM 2026 - Eriol
Come in, say hello: Who is here, some background information about ourselves (country/culture, profession, open source involvement - in what role?), wishes for this meeting and for our community (15 min)
Eriol did the spiel re. OSD.net with help from the other core maintainer team members
Is documentation a good place to start for designers? Many projects don’t have these user-focused documentation that is very focused on the executables
The issue with writing documentation is that it’s harder for a junior/newcomer to come in and start writing manuals for things they don’t have any prior knowledge about, since they haven’t been part of the project before
This means that usually the best people to start writing about that are the ones that did the implementation initially
Next Steps/Actions: If people want to pick up a topic that needs ‘filling in’ then community members absolutely can and should pick that up please! Helping to edit these sections as well as writing issues, mailing lists etc.
Website improvements
Lisa moved everything that she’s been working on into a Jekyll theme and doing this as an experiment: Where Design Meets Open Source
bugs, feedback, checking over the existing design, what pages need archiving but not deleteing - JanD has ideas - these are in issues in the main repo.
Lisa has an idea of the current thoughts on the website from discussions and notes and could guide towards the newer ideas for the website
The general ‘design’ needs to be picked back up too.
Google have now timeline and few/no expectations on how this work gets done.
They would very much like to see
Stories, needs, wants, thoughts opinions from the OSD.net community on how governance was, is and should be and why, then have a peson digest, synthesise and understand those stories and thoughts together and then form recommendations, proposals, suggestions, documents (tbc defined)
They want to be able to talk about this work more widely and replicate it if they want to
There is an advisory team for this work made up of around 4-5 people from the core maintainer team as a ‘overview’ of how this gets spent/done
Next steps are: Writing up the project outline for ‘applications’ and interest for the OSD.net jobs page but also the advisory team needs to consider how we might shortlist and choose folks that put in applications and why this is a preferred way of doing this rather than hiring someone/s we have a good idea can do the work well. (this isn’t a contract or job role with infrastructure, it’ll be a project someone will work on and invoice for so we won’t be acting as ‘employers’ in any official way.
FOSDEM
We have a full room!
Eriol wants to document how to run FOSDEM devroom this year so next year someone else can do it if they want to
Also we’re figuring out in the core maintainer team how to spend/distribute our travel stipend funds in an eqitable way!
FOSDEM Is a conference of/for open source projects happening in Bruxelles. we usually have a “room” track there (just in case people did not know about FOSDEM but did not want to ask)
A lot of people!
Second day was OSD devroom
Full room most of the time at 96 capacity.
Agenda topic: website Info Architecture
Agenda topic: Website update/platform
Agenda topic: How to OSD text
Agenda topic: Using OSS tools in your company and the limitations
@jdittrich is looking for self-contained design improvements that we could show as examples for design contributions. Reply to mastodon post, or write @jdittrich a discourse message!
Some questions about the pros and cons of Jekyll vs. Hugo (Hugo is easy to install, but needs github actions, Jekyll needs ruby but github runs it directly)
Convincing peers to use open source tools – what are good practices?
Act upon favorable conditions, like when proprietary tools raise their price, are not updated anymore or otherwise cause trouble. This gives good justification for investing time in a new tool now (rather than “maybe later”).
Find out what hinders people to switch. There can be many reasons.
Consider that familiar tools are always more intuitive and feel less clunky.
Learning time is important to get familiar with a new tool.
Easy import/export might be helpful to migrate to new tools (maybe try figma2penpot exporter ?)
I don’t usually join the calls but following passively with interest.
