Thanks for organising this! I’ll do my best to join as well.
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That’s a very inspiring conversation! I’d love to join the call as well 
I feel I understand and advance best through practice, so I wonder if there could also be sth more hands-on, like a collaborative Design/UX challenge? It seems a recurring challenge here is the lone designer situation, where a single designer tries to make a change on a project and then gradually feels isolated, not being able to move much, loses passion…
I’ve watched @scottjenson’s recent talk and the topics he brings up like clearly stating goals and non-goals, documenting constraints and decisions, working on culture and just generally having more designers on a project, these could potentially align well with an open workshop format, e.g. right here on the community.
Thank you to whoever made it today! Unfortunately we were not able to record the discussion, but I have shared the notes here for those interested.
Quick summary of our conversation:
We talked about our involvement with open source design, and found out that there’s a big range of experiences out there! Some are good, some not so good. There’s no “best practices” for open source design, but maybe we can work on that now! So we decided to document our experiences, stories and challenges and see if there is some wisdom that can be compiled into a “How to do Open Source Design” We will share our stories on the forums and meet again next month to find out what insights we can uncover.
Notes from the call
Participants
- Scott, Bernard, Belen, Simon, Manuel, Nimisha, Nico, Daniel
Topics discussed and notes
- Scott: Impostor syndrome, since worked mostly on closed source
- Open source design xp was not great
- Inspired him to do the FOSSBack talks
- Almost 100% of people doing UX in OS are funded, mature
- Belen: True but
- Very small projects much better xp, they reached out and asked for UX
- So it’s a big range
- Scott: How do we spend our time effectively? How to choose a project that is open and receptive to UX?
- Bernard:
- Working on a huge project, not well-funded, but underpinning a huge percentage of internet infrastructure that was run by volunteers completely, also didn’t do UX “properly”. There are a lot of different ways to do UX
- Nimisha: It’s important to understand how to work with a community before engaging
- Belen: my xp has been great actually!
- Scott: For a good experience, there has to be SOME understanding of what UX is
- Belen: Not really, the org I worked with just knew they needed design work
- Bernard: Org reached out “We need UX help”
- “We want logos and icons that make the software less unusable”
- Bernard does the design process, but there was no one to implement
- Feedback “Do small things regularly, not one big thing at the end because who knows how long the contributor will stay”
- Manuel:
- Couches.org completely run by volunteers
- Started out well organised with UX, but turned into a mess by now, want to reset
- It’s not about the tools, it’s about the onboarding, comms, etc
- Organising a UX design working group
- What could that better system look like?
- Belen: Let’s compile our experiences into one document
- Bernard: Open Source Stories project, but specific to design?
- Daniel: I have no idea how to involve designers in an open source way
- You can’t contribute to it over the weekend, it’s too complex
- A simple guide on how to contribute to design regardless of how complex the software is, could that help?
- It’s hard to branch off into small UX tasks like devs do with engg tasks, you need to understand the whole system before working with it
- Belen: there’s never been a serious discussion on how to do design in OSS, there are no best practices
- Maybe now’s the time!
- Compile experiences of people who did OSD and see what we can learn from it
Agenda and todos for next meeting
- Open a thread on the forum and have people share their experiences on that
- Prompts to get people excited
- Use a tag to organise
- UX stories or UX challenges – keep it friendly and welcoming!
- Meeting next month: bring one story!
There will be another meeting next month, so be sure to lurk the forum for any updates
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Yes – there is some research that claims (plausibly so imho) that code lends itself very well to the idea of FOSS collaboration whereas other “materials” might need different models of working together:
- Hill, Benjamin Mako, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández. 2013. “The Cost of Collaboration for Code and Art: Evidence from a Remixing Community.” In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 1035–46. ACM. (
- Duguid, Paul. 2006. “Limits of Self-Organization: Peer Production and ‘Laws of Quality.’” First Monday 11 (10). Limits of self-organization: Peer production and "laws of quality" | First Monday.
“social processes of Open Source software production may transfer to other fields of peer production, but, with regard to quality, software production remains a special case” (from the Dunguid paper)
Two more boring things to consider:
- Given that code is fairly esoteric (aka it can be only understood by people with specific skills), “you need to understand more” is a fairly easy defense against non-coders wanting to claim some power [1].
- If something is geared to the idea of “how this is structured” of one group (developers, in this case) it is unsurprising that for another discipline, “everything is connected” and not easy to modularize, since their ideas/needs/processes are not reflected in the structure yet. [2]
Footnotes
[1]: I could not find good studies on this focussing on devs and design; there are some historical studies of developers and management where in which this strategy is described – which is going on since the advent of coding.
[2]: Development/Architecture ideas like Domain Driven Design focus on finding out how concerns of disciplines (“domains”) intersect (or not), but I have rarely seen this in FOSS project.
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First @nim These are great notes, thank you very much.
@jdittrich is following up on two key questions I took from our chat:
- How is UX different from Eng in terms of planning (e.g. tasks, organization)?
- How best to “manage” UX work on projects?
Both @nolo and @dburka brought these up (from different directions) There appears to be a strong desire to understand these questions to create more effective teams. It can’t just be “Be nice, ask lots of questions, and don’t be pushy” which is the generic advice I’ve heard a few times.
I love the very concrete suggestion to post “success stories” to the this forum (either large or small). What have you done/experienced that seems to have been a step in the right direction? The goal is for others chime in and see if we can find any common patterns.
If this could be done over the next few weeks it would most helpful as we’d have something to discuss at our next meeting 
I’ll try to post mine in a few days. I hope others chime in as well.
Do we need a hashtag? I’d like to make sure we can group these stories together easily.
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Looks like tags are not enabled on the forum right now? Idk, could we have them enabled and add one tag for our stories? …we could also add a touch of highlight for the next month or so 
:
Style declaration
.discourse-tag {
border-radius: 2px;
&[data-tag-name="ux-stories"] {
background: linear-gradient(319deg, #cdedfd 0%, #ffec82 37%, #ffcfd2 100%);
}
}
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The forum has a low-enough activity that I don’t think that tags are needed atm – for now I would suggest to prefix with “Story:”, or an emoji of our choice. Then, we could go with tags or, maybe better, a category.
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I think @jdittrich 's suggestion is the simplest and most immediately actionable. Preface your post with “Story:” and if we can figure out a cool emoji, all the better
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