Hello folks watching this thread! I’m for sure, not a historical member i.e. I was not around when this was first beautifully conceived but it is very important!
@mray For the sake of my dyslexic brain, would you mind copying the two manifesto statements with your additions in? so I can have a read (and others too) I suspect there’s not a huge issue with the additions/changes and more of a 'we’re all doing stuff here in our spare time as volunteer type humans that are sometimes forgetful or miss stuff! I can’t imagine any harm/purposeful ignoring was meant!
In general, the Manifesto principles (once @mray’s additions/amends have been made) look great and I’d love to see them up on the main site but with a clear way to do feedback/discourse however…heres me sticking something in quite late but I don’t see details or mention of our communities limitations like 'We’re all volunteers and do this work largely outside of a main ‘job’ as a labour of love and interest.
I may be poorly educated in what makes up a manifesto but I do think that key to embodying these principles the OSD group (and humans therein) is that we are fallible in many ways. It could also help limit expectations of perfection.
Personal opinion/experience time!
Ethics is hard. Language is imperfect and we can’t climb inside each other’s brains to really ‘get each other’ on this topic. Also, designers and technologists, will all have there own flavour of ethical. Some people like gambling, some people smoke, some people think plastic is bad. I think what most humans can commit to is respectful discussion and compassionate debate on ethics and probably not consensus. Perhaps our ethical statement can recognise this challenge and at the very least, when ethical debates arise within the open-source community at large, we as OSD (and separately as individuals) support and strive to feed into that conversation from a design perspective.
Now onto my super un-popular opinion on free design software.
I would love free and open-source design tools that do all the things that I expect as a designer coming from the non-open source world (I’m an open-source baby in general terms, been around for about…3 or 4 years?) but it doesn’t yet. If and when my time allows, will I contribute to the FOSS design tools? you bet I will! Will I also continue contributing to FOSS and OSS with non-OS design tools? yup I sure will. When I meet with new baby designers that are interested in OSS will I tell them about the FOSS design tools? yes, 100% will I tell them it’s the only thing they can use to contribute to OSS absolutely not, we’re not there are a larger design community yet, one day we will be, but it’s not now.
If we wanted to put into some kind of words a collective agreement on ‘How much, when and why we should talk about free and open design tools’ I would love that but chances are, I’m gonna break a hard and fast rule about it and…errr deep breaths I have had super negative experiences trying to get into the OSS community around gatekeeping which came down to ‘oh you don’t know what free really means?’ ouch. not inclusive and not supportive.
IMO I want OSD to be more inclusive than anything else, because with more people comes more capacity, ideas, tools and general good stuff (and probably some bad) but I mostly don’t want it to seem, to the non-OSS design crowd, to be ‘out of reach’. I don’t want to coddle the design industry either, but it’s a tricky balance.
ugh. some much text. sorry!
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for desigers.