Hello everyone here’s the poll where you can vote for what we should be spending the open source design funds on! We haven’t had many votes so far so we need more to get a clearer answer from the community with what we should be spending our funds on 
https://cloud.opensourcedesign.net/apps/polls/s/D8mVWIz6qMXllkkw
The poll will stay open for another month so that people who don’t regularly check the forum get a chance to see. I’ll be tweeting and trying to ensure we communicate this poll widely to be as transparent and inclusive as possible! But let me know if there are other places we can reach the open source design community best (possible in a github issue?)
If you’d like to see our Open Collective to view our funds here’s the link: Open Source Design - Open Collective
We have 28 votes so far in the poll - I’m going to do another push on social media to see if we can get any more votes
Ok folks - We’ll be closing the ‘How to spend our money poll’ in 1 week so that’s the 9th of September 2021.
If you want to vote before then use this link https://cloud.opensourcedesign.net/apps/polls/s/D8mVWIz6qMXllkkw
You don’t need to login to vote but you will need to indicate a name of sorts but you can use an alias
After the poll closes we’re likely to have several forum thread conversations and community call conversations about what we collectively want to do with these results and how to pursue what the community has indicated is the priority for Open Source Design.
As of the 2nd of September 2021 the poll has 34 votes. I won’t mention the front runner to try to not affect voting.
Okay so the poll has closed as of 08.20 BST UK Time.
We had 35 responses! which is awesome 
especially since we’re a distributed and ansync community where roughly 10 people attend the community call regularly this means we at least reached some community members that don’t attend those calls.
I also think personally that the signal that all ideas got at least 1 vote means all ideas were good ideas and none of the below are ‘wasted’ ideas or thoughts. I’d like to see how we keep some of these ideas evolving as we collect efforts around the leading idea.
Our community choice leader is: ‘Open Source Design internship program. Collaborate with Outreachy or a similar OSS internship program to fund a ‘OSS Design’ specific program’ with 18 votes
Other topics got this many votes:
Sponsor designers to go to OSS conferences incl travel grants - 8 votes
Sponsor conferences on behalf of Open Source Design - 1 vote
Select jobs from jobs board to assign paid bounties to them for OSS designers to complete - 10 votes
Improve our jobs board design and code by paying people to improve the jobs board based off of research - 8 votes
Pay an accessibility organisation or freelancer to do an accessibility audit of opensourcedesign.net - 4 votes
Fund an online or hybrid in person Open Source Design Summit or conference - 11 votes
Pay for a freelancer or org to investigate ‘infrastructure for designers in OSS’ e.g. tooling and processes for open source design - 4 votes
Pay to support researchers looking at FLOSS and design that is linked to our group interests - 8 votes
Screenshot of the poll questions on the Open Source Design NextCloud account
So In the coming days I will open up a thread on the forum and propose a way of following up on the discussions around our leading idea around supporting internships/fellowships for designers in OSS. Just remember that even though we mentioned ‘like outreachy’ we don’t have to commit to that as the process and we can now start discovering whether that is what the community agrees on or wants.
Thanks everyone 
