Monthly Open Source Design call

Open Source Design meta Monthly call
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Ahead of next weeks community call I just want to note that I reached back out to outreachy to give them the results of our poll and that we’ll start community conversations about what internships and fellowships for designers in OSS, supported by open Source Design will look like going forward.

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Mini intros round!

Briefly, into the core group: Open Source Design core team

Finished and updates on AP’s from the last meeting:

Not finished AP’s from the last meeting:

  • AP: Anyone Two wrap-up pieces of writing has been requested one that is about the processes and a second that is around open source design jobs including some case studies of jobs that have or haven’t been filled. Please write directly in the Rise Up pad if you have ideas and don’t be shy! the doc is open and welcome to ideas. Rise up etherpad here

  • AP: Anyone: mini-guide on what design processes are needed within an org at high-strategy level and then individual products/services level → if anyone wants to start this guide writing go for it! :smiley:

Open Topic: Design cycle of a project via Abhishek

  • A cycle for design?
    • When a PR for a small feature is merged it can be ‘done’ but not done-done as there can always be improvements on the feature.
    • How are further feature requests gathered and included?
  • Does an OSS product ever have a design ‘finished?’
  • What does the continuous design process?
  • What does the design person do after things are finished and usable?
  • The inherent answer to “does a company need Design” is usually YES (just like “do you need excellent system engineering”, the answer is often the same = YES). The ‘what kind of Design’ is the finer detail… would be good to draft a mini-guide (I’m sure it’s been done before). I know that the Linux Foundation could use such a decision tool, and the LF Public Health arm specifically needs it.
  • A lot of good design work I have seen folks do almost always starts and involves a lot of user research
  • Marie Nordin re. great open-source design in Red Hat.
  • Can we use a real project as an example?
  • Products evolve over years design tools was used as an example? What level are you coming in at?
  • it’s more like the feature is done for this iteration
  • MedicMobile is a good example of continual funding model of OS

Open Topic: UX maturity in OSS

  • We took some time to read this Maturity scale that Eriol created
  • “Design has an ‘output’” I think this point applies to development as well sometimes, depending on the team and manager.
  • User Lead = is that The PInnacle → the philosophical bend, yes but as a selling point of Design. it’s the value of the process at the exec level. Where of course, the human that’s using a service, is the atomic unit.
  • What maturity is it when Design is Written into the Ethos/Company Rules of Engagement?
  • Feedback: After point 5 the progress is too steep and needs work so point 6-8.
  • I’m also seeing your curve of engagement.
  • Absent vs misunderstood is pretty interesting → described as when an OSS org has a misconception of design as a certain ‘thing’ e.g. you are a designer and you make UI only. Stage 0 describes an OSS that has no or minimal pre-concieved notions of what a designer or design does.
  • Feedback: Nimisha mentioned a part of the OSS design process where some maturity stages are impossible or next to impossible so how do we surface this as a consideration within the maturity resource.

Poll results: Open Source Design fellowship/internship

  • We’ll talk about this next time! :slight_smile:

Cool project we mentioned

  • MedicMobile is a good example of continual funding model of OS
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We have our community call next Wednesday 3rd November at 19.00 CEST :smiley:

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Mini intros round!

Briefly, into the core group: Open Source Design core team

Finished and updates on AP’s from the last meeting:

Not finished AP’s from the last meeting:

Open Topics:

Hacktoberfest

  • Merge requests not being valuable in exchange for schwag
  • Does hacktoberfest work for open source design? talk topic!
  • Not just a hacktoberfest problem a general design problem.
  • Linux Foundation is struggling with the same concept, just not in 1 month but overall
  • How can design work outside of hacktoberfest too
  • How big is the project? how aligned is the “new” design? (ie context of contribution also matters)
  • We talked about how Eriol had onboarded designers in OFN
  • Opening up research and insights into design thinking can help designers contribute more legitimate and informed design work rather than design work not informed by the realities of. the project. Eriol shared an example of when this happened in OFN.

FOSDEM Dev room

FOSS Backstage

Open Source Design fellowship/internship

  • Short meeting today so this is pushed back
  • AP: Eriol still has some comms and wrangling to do on this topic

Cool projects

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There were 4 of us on the call yesterday and we finished a bit earlier! we mostly talked FOSDEM prep!

FOSDEM

To do

  • Check on the pitch your project room permissions for the panel - Q&A
  • 1 full day Saturday 5th February
  • Do we want to go with 40 mins (5 mins Q&A) recommendation? or 20 min (+5 mins Q&A) 5 min change over - we can see if we can accept around 3 45 min submissions
  • Speaker point person volunteer role
  • Volunteer for pitch your project + adding these to the jobs board
  • Social media person
  • Nim Devroom at FOSDEM 2022 - Call for Participation - Nim Blog < This blog post is good and Eriol can make an event posting on Events - Open Source Design
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Jan 5th 2022 community call

Just me an Juhan for 20 mins on this call - are the community calls not working for folks? too late? too early? day not good?

FOSDEM

To do

  • accept talks
  • schedule
  • set up video room
  • email for video uploads from speakers
  • co-ordinate the day

FOSS Backstage

To do

  • FOSS backstage is having a UX Clinic!
  • Needs organising

Open Source Design fellowship/internship

  • Short meeting today so this is pushed back
  • AP: Eriol still has some comms and wrangling to do on this topic
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I’d like to propose the following loose agenda for the February call. Please suggest changes/additions/modifications.

Intros

February 2nd 2022 Call

FOSDEM

  • Discussing what’ll happen, logistics
  • (possibly) speaker intros (speakers have been invited to join the call)
  • FOSDEM 2022: Support for speakers - #2 by ei8fdb
  • Eriol asked about how to set up pitch your project
  • We’ll use a jitsi room for this
  • Eriol & Amit will make videos for the sick/absent speakers
  • Mars made a flow chart of the Matrix flow chart to contribute to the FOSDEM team to support understanding the platform

FOSS Backstage

Open Collective

Putting our funds to good use

  • update: Still mentoring

Anything else?

  • Thank the big donation person and ask for a chat or video why
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Hey folks, I won’t be at the EU timezone community call tomorrow! apologies

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I would like to add something to the agenda for today’s community call. It’s a follow-up from the FOSDEM 2022 OSD track! I connected with another speaker there, Elizabeth Vu, the Program Associate of the Sloan Foundation. There is a potential grant for UX in scientific open-source. It’s still in the very early stages so I don’t have any requests for anyone. Its more of a heads-up and update :grinning:

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Noted! I’ll be in the call.

The agenda for now is:

If you want to discuss anything else, add it to the list!

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We also briefly spoke about: COSCUP 2022 - OSS conference in Taiwan with open design track - #2 by ei8fdb

OSD can volunteer to help out Eriol in supporting COSCUP and the open design conference track if they want (please DM eriol)

We then did a short recap on the ‘How to spend our OSD open collective money’ topic from mid last year.

We now have just under 10k in our Open collective and a few actions still pending. Those will be collected here Continuing conversations about fellowships/Internships in open Source Design - #5 by jdittrich along with some great ideas like what jan D raised about pairing a dev + designer on an internship + fellow.

here are some notes from the chat:

We discussed the sloan funding for scientific OSS - eriol shared their OSS papers list from their Phd: https://erioldoesdesign.notion.site/25f1dd8696544d80acd931700418ca8b?v=34c663ce82274dd3b55a79b283b09d70

“Scientific software sucks. What are the Design Tenets?”
Broad Institute = open source bio/sci software… and they have design teams what have they done, how have they tackled this?
Podcast on scientific OSS https://sosdesign.sustainoss.org/15
Gathering evidence on the problem set then you can rank order the severity of problems
Another US example: All of Us software design/development (National Institutes of Health sponsored project)

Someone need to do a wrap up of FOSDEM 2022 here’s an example from last year that Eriol wrote (badly) https://opensourcedesign.net/design/open/source/2021/05/05/FOSDEM-2021-Open-Source-Design-Devroom-wrap-up.html

Videos from FOSDEM are up! https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/track/open_source_design/

Briefly talked about Mozfest’s format and then the UX Clinic volunteers https://www.mozillafestival.org/en/#/
Spoke about a past clinic help session with a terminal tool: multitasking in cmd line = this topic alone ups the Design reputation with engineers (if we’re making it better)

The fellowship/internship/mentoring for OSD designers

Has it been discussed whether it might be an option to link it up with GSoC for dev work?
pair coding/designing = better. I dig it.
underexposed via simsec did try that in some ways
https://simplysecure.org/blog/underexposed-2019-recap/
(Design can have higher costs, especially when we screw up on Strategy, but point taken Jan on $$)

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April 6th 2022 Call

Intros

Anybody have topics they want to discuss?

  • Two folks wanted to ask about: Experiences of us as open source designers in the community with tools and processes and fixing UI problems? or “Tell us a story about a successful interaction between your design work on an OSS project where you had to collaborate/communicate with engineers” and the inverse (a negative interaction). "

  • Eriol told a story about doing Exploratory research in Open Food Network

  • Jan told a story about… (sorry @jdittrich I fully lost my notes on this!) but also wrote: this write-up: https://www.fordes.de/posts/CulturesUXOpenSource.html

  • Bernard told a story about contributing mermaid graphs to Joplin: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/6100

  • Matthew told a story about working with technical devs (I think I got this right but please correct if not!)

  • Comments in the chat:

    • “give us wireframes” ← When OSS asks for this not always a good ask! follow up question of: Do they ask for “wireframes” without any other discussions?
    • i think a lot of the product development approaches for mvps or even launches are development first
    • customer support: indeed, great source!
    • Did their job posting say “Design Wizard” maybe?
    • These conversations are also a direct reflection of where Design “sits” in the project or organization. If Design comes in from the top of the project (founder/referred “wizard” or “sorceress”), then the pain is a bit different.
    • Interesting point of view since there is some research on projects being hostile towards design and HCI because they are not doing “Real contributions”
      Steffen Kotschi says: There is a beautiful example of I think it was handbrake, where usability issues were closed because it’s an expert application and users are supposed to be able to handle bad UX in this context
    • there is always some truth in that statement, since design mafia often treat design like a holy grail
    • Design can definitely put itself on a pedestal or create an ivory tower situation.

  • Saptak recommended: https://sosdesign.sustainoss.org/18 might have some good insights where we talked about developer and designer contribution

  • Eriol Recommended: I did a mini casual talk about onboarding designers in some of the projects I worked in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6IVuWoz3H8&t=516s

Fellowships/Internships for Designers (+Developer!) in FLOSS

Action points and to dos

  • @Erioldoesdesign Draft a form for FLOSS projects to tell us what they might ask a designer (+Developer) for during an internship period.

    • Be sure to ask about roughly what tasks they want done
    • Be sure to ask what time frame they’d want the fellow/intern for
    • Not too long a form!
    • On OSD’s Nextcloud

  • Consider a survey also for designers about how/what they want from an internship/fellowship in FLOSS

  • @Erioldoesdesign Invite Sage to May’s call ← Done!

  • @Erioldoesdesign Find a time that works between interested folks from Simply Secure & @jdittrich and other fellow/intern interested folks

  • @Erioldoesdesign and @ei8fdb and @SaptakS to find time to do a ‘hack day’ with a spreadsheet and go through all known internship/fellowship FLOSS programs and make a ‘matrix’ of what happens in these typically and what we think we want to leverage.

  • FOSDEM + FOSSBackstage + Mozfest + other? articles/summaries from these conferences need writing!

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My story was about offering to consult a developer 1:1 on how to create a UI for a specific problem. The advantage was that by taking the time with me, I knew they were interested (in contrast to: “Sure you can design, drop it here and see who picks it up”) and they could also directly give me feebback if my ideas were not technologically feasible or if they just did not like them (If the dev hates it, it does not get implemented, so no need to waste time, here). Balsamiq is a nice tool for such sessions, though any digital whiteboarding software will be useful.

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Just a bit of feedback on discoverability of this call series. I had looked into it a few times but could never find out when these calls happens, wasn’t actually sure if they still do. Today I saw this transcript and decided to look a bit further. Ended up clicking on the small “Aug 2017” text in the sidebar timeline, which took me to the first post, where I saw a link to the monthly event calendar (which I am now subscribed to). I think this calendar, and a note about monthly calls, could easily be added to the home page under “Events”. Could also post an announcement in this thread 1 week and/or day before the call (looks like you post on Twitter the day of, which I did not see beforehand, and seems a bit late to make time for it in their schedules). Would give this series more visibility. Hope that feedback is helpful, might just have been my experience, and I unfortunately won’t be able to join the next call because I already have something else scheduled at that time. Hopefully I can make the one after.

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I opened a pull request to mention the calendar on the home page. Feedback & review appreciated.

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Hey everyone - it’s highly likely won’t make the community call this week on Wednesday: 2022-05-04T17:00:00Z→2022-05-04T18:00:00Z

We have a lot that we mean’t to cover and a lot of AP’s I didn’t get to during April. Would be great if someone else could make sure the meeting is hosted :slight_smile:

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My addition to today’s agenda

  • Update on ‘potential grant for UX in scientific open-source’

    • Which factor most affects the experience of UX contributors in scientific open-source software?
    • Usability is an important aspect of Open Source Software (OSS).
    • Scientific software especially benefits from usability.
    • While there exists literature for how to improve the UX in open-source software and UX in scientific software, there is a gap in the experiences of current and potential UX contributors in scientific OSS.
    • These UX contributors face many unique barriers in contributing to scientific OSS that differs from non-scientific OSS.
    • Taking from existing literature from Human-Computer Interactions (HCI), this grant aims to confirm if HCI findings still apply or how they have changed in this context.

  • Would like to talk about ‘The user in the cultures of UX design and open source’- bazaar vs cathedral, CLI in scientific open-source

    • Juhan: UX = a commodity. So what part of Design is particularly strategic, that one can “Sell” to open source projects…
    • Can get to a good baseline- but how to get to Design. Capital D Design, get developer team invested and pay for design.
    • How do we sell to the right people? and impact in investment?

  • There already exists so much knowledge here but not ‘upstream’ back to scientific open source yet

  • Adding on to the ‘design internships’ topic- my experience as co-host of a design internship for JupyterLab

  • Jan: ‘Communities of Practice’

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Meeting is happening

Topics:

  • FOSS internship: No news from Jan
  • @saponasan @Gionni interested in stories about design in open source; want to write a guide to help people to work in Open Soruce (see …how to improve the collaboration)
  • @MarsBarLee is interested in the user experience in scientific FOSS; a lot of academic software is a “byproduct” of academic work.
    • Juhan: UX = a commodity. So what part of Design is particularly strategic, that one can “Sell” to open source projects…
    • Can get to a good baseline- but how to get to Design. Capital D Design, get developer team invested and pay for design.
    • How do we sell to the right people? and impact in investment? vs academic vs commercial software
    • “You might have to approach the problem of ‘generating interest and gaining buy in for design’ at different strategic levels”
      • Design can make things pretty < design can erase friction for the user in the existing experience < design can provide directional data on how the experience could be enhanced or augmented to become more valuable < design can influence the vision and nature of product as part of a larger industry or ecosystem of tools
    • Scientific OSS are one ‘community of practice’ that starts, put credence to academic publishing, validation of design in scientific OSS
    • Matthew Pereira: What is the distance between user-developer vs general/consuming users? And how could design help to close that gap?
    • Matthew: In other industries there are concepts of high-code and low-code users and no-code experiences - is the terminal + code experience in academic tools adequately suited to the general/consuming users or could a different approach be beneficial?
    • Matthew: What is the power user experience vs paved path to success, what guard rails would be beneficial to put in place?
    • What are motivations and behaviors of NumPy users, what are their obstacles, and how can design can facilitate an experiment to move things forward.
    • Experiment- alternative user experience, alternative
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I added my experience as a mentor for design internship for an OSS project here, in the thread about the OSD’s internship. I saw the past agenda discussion about internships, so added my bit there.

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June 1st 2022 Call

2022-06-01T17:00:00Z→2022-06-01T18:00:00Z

Intros

Anybody have topics they want to discuss?

  • FOSS Design internships and maybe setting a date/days to co work
  • Some updates from the Sustain Design & UX group the summit + how they want to support OSD