Two related questions to answer in the replies, if you like:
What do you wish the open source design community and infrastructure would enable you to do?
How could you, as a part of the open source design community, enable others? (Freel free to omit if you do not have an idea what that could be)
The community (in one form or another) exists since almost 10 years, now, and many new people joined. We often get welcome messages from new people joining the discourse but we don’t discuss the questions above there (would be too much for the thread anyway). I hope both newcomers and long-term members have wishes and offers to share!
To share my thought and to show what I imagined here is my contribution:
What do you wish the open source design community and infrastructure would enable you to do?
I would love to learn more about struggles and joy of people who design in open source projects. There is research on this but we have few exchange here on the forum.
I would love to learn more about how people learn to design. This is less open source software related but more related to the practice of design and its openness.
I would love to develop concepts and theories about what design in open source means, what it can do and how it is limited.
How could you, as a part of the open source design community, enable others?
I coached projects in the past so maybe I could help some projects and people here?
I try to share design processes to help others to understand how one can design (its not the process but one process).
What do you wish the open source design community and infrastructure would enable you to do
Is it a fair assumption to make that most people who join here, come with the intention of finding open source opportunities? It feels like there are probably more of us than there are opportunities. I would wish some opportunities were more detailed in their expectations cause “audit” could mean more than 1 thing to me. Anyways I would want to contribute somehow, but the right opportunity hasn’t really shown itself yet.
How could you, as a part of the open source design community, enable others?
Perhaps seek out opportunities and post them here as leads?
I am pretty new to the subject of open source design, coming from a technical background mostly. My primary need is learning resources, both in form of static text (blog articles, tutorials etc) as well as vivid conversations.
So learning from others is my wish from the community. Maybe even a review of my work.
I am not sure about an infrastructure aspect, though.
I am not sure. In particular, I don’t know if my experiences are (already) worth sharing. I feel like I’m going a lot of custom ways in the context of my work, mostly Forgejo. I don’t know if this is due to lack of learning resources and established best practices in projects (in which case sharing could benefit others), or if it is because I didn’t find more input on how to do the work (in which case sharing would generate noise, because better practices exist somewhere, but are not yet known to me).
What do you wish the open source design community and infrastructure would enable you to do?
OSD community and infrastucture has already helped me:
connect with designers
point to underlying research/principles/context from other practices (Unflattening, The Cathedral and the Bazaar) that connect to mine
What else I wish OSD could provide:
Find the strategies and resources to fund and support design in open source.
I know several developers who are supporting themselves in open source but much less designers doing the same.
I heard from Saptak that FOSDEM is a place I could find out more on how designers do this
How could you, as a part of the open source design community, enable others?
One very tangible way I’ve been enable others to design is by hosting zine making workshop at conferences. The prompt is ‘Tell your Open Source Story’.
People have made zines about
starting with Linux
their local Python communities such as PyDelhi
the most powerful feature of Zaar (an open source library)
their favorite talk at PyCon which was on federated learning
how someone convinced their friend to start using Python
Comic and zines has been a very approachable conversation starter to talk about design in the Scientific Python space. People have told me that
‘I can’t draw- but I liked drawing this!’
‘I used to draw all the time… this session was a nice way to come back to drawing’.
‘I’m inspired by your story- oh, you want me to write my own story? I can try!’
What do you wish the open source design community and infrastructure would enable you to do?
As a developer I am interested to learn more about design, tools and practices from the open source community to apply to my own projects and the ones I contribute to. In particular the aspects that often get too little/late attention such as accessibility.
How could you, as a part of the open source design community, enable others?
I look forward to new posts on this forum and try to engage where I can. As a developer I can offer that perspective on issues.
I made a small contribution to the OSD codebase on GitHub to fix a bug and would be happy to help out again in future, time allowing.
I attended FOSDEM in the past (which was how I first learnt of this community) and attended the OSD track. I hope to go again in future and that would be a great way to help contribute to the conversation in person.
