OpenSourceDesign Jobs process

Design Lounge Communication and collaboration
1

I want us to think about (and if we were to reach some conclusions at the summit would be ideal) on what is the process we want to promote / encourage / decide for our Job Board.

What is the purpose of our Job Board?

  1. I think is to encourage organizations to submit their needs in the hope they will find someone interested in helping.
  2. For designers to find interesting projects to work on. If they are paid is the cherry on top.
  3. other ???

I am very happy that we clearly stated in several issues comments that we are willing to accept and promote JUST job posts for Open Source projects and we don’t encourage commercial entries. I think this is the thing that differentiate us from other boards and is also our mind set.

Now we don’t present at all what will happen after a designer and an organization found themselves and how the process continues.

We don’t have a clear overview if the post is still active or not, or if someone contacted the organization and if some work has been done. This might be a topic on its own on how we should make sure the posts are up to date.

I also find it concerning that some organizations that post entries on our board don’t want the process to be ‘open’. They don’t want “too many opinions” involved or they want to control the outcome, etc.
It’s kind of sad to see that even if they have the code open, their approach to design is different.

So this topic’s purpose is to discuss what do we do in cases like described above:

  • Do we insist to have a GitHub issue open on OpenSourceDesign and discuss there?
  • Do we stop helping these kind of organizations?

Some organizations insisted that we close the issue on our tracker since they have their own tracker and processes. I don’t see why a duplicated issue would be a problem. Also I don’t like this approach like we are a ‘website’ where you can ‘snatch’ a designer and then do what you want with it :slight_smile:

Maybe there could be some exceptions if the job is payed and let the organizations have their ‘rules’, but otherwise how I am motivated as a designer to help an organization behind closed doors, without any visibility, without external feedback and against the principles I am trying to promote? and for free.

So this is the topic I want to know your opinion on and maybe have some process / rules for the way we want to have our Job board to run.

So, what’s your opinion?

1 Like
2

I think you raise excellent points.

Honestly, I think we’re going to have to roll our own job board and maybe host it on a free Heroku instance, or something similar. Right now the editing of past jobs is a pain, jobs don’t necessarily expire, we have no information on the post, etc.

I think a simple webapp that enables people to say “I’m interested” or “I applied” would go a long way to addressing some of your concerns, don’t you think?

I also find it concerning / disturbing that some organizations that post entries on our board don’t want the process to be ‘open’.

Can you point out any instances where this is the case? I think that will help me frame answers to your questions.

3

The 2 instances I have in mind are both related to some Apache projects. But this doesn’t mean this doesn’t happen with other communities.

4

There will be many “I’m interested”, similar to hearts on Twitter, and that’s not really relevant. What I would like is to have a place where we can receive and give feedback on the design proposals in order to learn from each other.

Also “multiple eyes” means better designs. Sure things can divagate and cause confusion for beginner designers, but usually when some things spark discussions, improving them brings benefits on the long term.

5

So you’re looking for how people are contributing to a job posting at multiple stages, and possibly giving feedback?

6

I’m looking for a process where we encourage people to create issues for the job posts they are taking, posting the iterations / results on the issue in order to discuss and get feedback from other OS designers.
Also I am looking to educate OS organizations to follow open practices for design too, not just for code.

7

I totally agree on the problem of it being hard to close job posts.

I think I understand that concern – if it would be code, they would not have some issues outside of their tracker as well. I suppose for me it is not the duplicate that would concern me, but not having a single “source-of-truth” issue.

I like that idea much, however, many design projects might be entangled with a lot of stakeholder groups, constraints etc. so they will not make much sense without this context on our github issues or so. So, for my own work I can imagine it for a logo, but not really for an interface redesign for user role settings on Mediawiki or so.

It would be good to collect the antipatterns and the reasons for them. I agree that closing the discussion is not right, but it easily happens that everyone chimes in with pretty unhelpful feedback and that might be a quick fix to the problem.
Or it is actually a matter of unidirectionally having control and silently shutting down a suggestion, which would be bad indeed.