I’m working with a project which is looking into getting a new logo. I recommended Open Source Design (which they’d not heard of yet) for the work and said I’d do some digging for them.
Checking the Jobs board is…not encouraging. The listings go back through the entire history of the Forums, but it’s impossible for a prospective job poster to tell whether the jobs were picked up, how long it took for them to be picked up, whether the poster was happy with the end result. As a prospective job poster, it would be very helpful, for instance, to gauge whether paid jobs get picked up more quickly than gratis (probably are), or whether most jobs end up languishing or taking a long time for someone to pick up.
Does anyone have any of this data that they could share? Or testimonials from past job posters?
I can only comment from the point of view of someone interested in a pro-bono logo work. It worked really well and the project is super happy with the result.
Since we were asking for pro-bono work, we were careful to make clear this is not just a way for us to save money so our salaries can be higher or to invest in a company that we could later resell. A few years later I’m happy to say that we kept this promise.
We were also patient because the designer had other obligations and squeezed time to work on the when she could. The overall process took about three months.
Last but not least, to showcase a successful pro-bono work, with the permission of the designer, the logo was submitted in this forum for comments. And, as you can see from the thread, it got a valuable improvement as a result.
@vmbrasseur you raise a really good point. I think this is worth investigating if there’s a way to encourage resolution on the jobs that get posted on the forum. The reason that they are on discourse and not in github issues is largely due to the whole ‘not all designers are comfortable with github’ so we get into a looping problem…
Other suggestions could be:
Discourse forum moderators checking in on jobs and asking for updates/completion and then editing posts to be ‘completed’
Making sure that: https://opensourcedesign.net/jobs/ is better updated when things are taken. New things are added. This requires core team members that can work on the website though and some of us aren’t up to speed on that.
Talking about opening up, this sounds like something people outside the core group could do. Could be a dedicated role, which isn’t necessarily time-consuming.
Apart from that, a great help would be an automated email sent to the poster (the email address is recorded, after all), asking about the current status. Posters could then reply to that email, which creates an issue on GH (?)
Great ideas @keunes I think making dedicated areas or responsibilities for volunteers/OSD members would be great rather than the ‘You join the core group and do *all the things!*if you want to be more involved with OSD’
Noting these this down for future improvement issue:
(opt in) After X period of time, send an email to the original job poster asking to update on it’s status.
