UX Bootcamp for FOSS projects by Scott Jenson

Scott Jenson (https://jenson.org) has offered to organise a UX Bootcamp for FOSS projects. Details are still hazy, but this is what’s been discussed so far:

  • The activity would be aimed to medium-sized projects with no major corporate support
  • It would target the projects’ “leadership”, whatever that means for each project
  • It would take place via video conference (so no travelling required)

No details on duration or dates just yet, but if your project is interested / intrigued, please comment on this thread.

Cheers,

Belen

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I’m interested in more details, at least. Thanks.

Hi @pdurbin

Sorry for the late reply. I don’t have much more detail that what I’ve mentioned in the initial post, I’m afraid. We are waiting for Scott Jenson to provide a bit more information about duration, programme and potential dates.

In the meantime, I will let him know you’ve expressed some interest.

The bootcamp is supposed to be aimed to FOSS projects. Would this be Dataverse?

Thanks!!

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Oh, maybe I misunderstood “for FLOSS projects” because I was thinking “for FLOSS developers.” I see now that “leadership” of a particular project is targeted. I assume that a single project would appear during the video conference. You probably wouldn’t want multiple projects in the same video conference and you probably wouldn’t want random developers who are not working on the project. I feel like Dataverse already has religion about UX but I still wouldn’t mind hearing more details. It sounds like a good opportunity. Thanks!

I just learned of this thread so I’m going to jump in and explain a bit further. This project came out of a Twitter thread, discussing how to help FOSS projects have better UX support. I suggested a ‘bootcamp’ style workshop I did while I was at frog design for startups which was very successful. It brings together the leadership of a project and discuss what was critical to the project and how prioritize UX issues for the project.

It was clear most FOSS projects are remote (and under funded) so we couldn’t require travel and we couldn’t require a full day workshop. These are a challenge to be sure but we wanted to try something out and see if it was effective. The rough outline is that I would do what is called “stake holder interviews” where I would discuss with each member of the team about the project and how UX needed to be done. I’d then bring everyone together for a 1 hour VC to discuss my findings and suggest a few simple projects. If all that goes well, we’d have 2-3 UX exercises/projects/explorations that could be done (by a combination of me and the team themselves) and after doing those, we’d have another 1 hour meeting to review.

The goal was to understand what UX projects (if any) a team needs to do. This can’t be me doing all the work, it’s a process of making the entire team motivated to do UX work and to have this be a group effort.

I hope that helps explain things in more detail.

Scott

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