What should Open Source Design focus on in the future?

Open Source Design meta
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In our recent community call, the question of what the Open Source Design Community wants to achieve was asked.

We did not have time to collect input on the call and it is nicer to do it more openly here:
What should OSD to focus on and have an impact in?
Maybe write some longer bullet points or some short paragraphs.

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Personally i would like to see Open Source Design do the following:

  1. Become a legal entity or have a spinoff entity that operates like a foundation or non-profit
  2. Figure out community decision making in regards to spending donation funds transparently and ethically according to community agreed values
  3. Found a Open Source Design OSPO
  4. Influence and/or lobby for more inclusive licensencing that includes design (in many forms)
  5. Influence and lobby platforms to include features and design representation e.g. source forges, coding software, OSā€™s, CLIā€™s and other essential to OSS tools
  6. Influence and lobby standards bodies like IEEE etc.
  7. Support individual designers into OSS as a form of earning income jobs/freelance etc
  8. Be opinionated about what is ā€˜goodā€™ design in OSS e.g. accessibility, usability, principles
  9. Specifically be involved in Civic Technology, Sovreignty, Right to choose/repair/locally host.
  10. Encourage and help build designers in Innersource teams for where they exists
  11. Fundraise to pay for internships for designers in OSS projects
  12. Fundraise to pay OSS projects/maintainers to learn about design/usability

And finally, continue to talk, support, debate, encourage, speak, offer eahc other mutual aid, and just survive as designers in OSS.

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My urgency could be naive but given the challenges driven by centralized tech stacks, open source feels like a critical path forward. We need to do more. While we canā€™t of course single-handedly fix this: how can successfully bring the UX excellence into the open-source ecosystem?

1. Make UX ā€œbiggerā€ in the FOSS ecosystem
Showcase how cool, useful, and successful UX in open source can be. Build a social media presence to share interesting articles and highlight examples of positive open-source UX.

2. Help Maintainers get started quickly with UX
The current website has 3 header categories: Articles, Events, and Jobs & Projects. There is no easily discoverable ā€œGetting Startedā€ section that may include articles weā€™ve already written. It could also link to other articles from around the web. Just create a place desperate mainters can come to and get some helpful links to get them started. We may even want to write a few new articles.

3. Leverage Our Collective Superpower
We have a fantastic group of people with a wealth of experience. We should share that knowledge directly without burning ourselves out, e.g. set up lightweight mentoring clinics for open-source projects looking for direction.

I do have a more aggressive idea: what would we do if we had 100K euros? Iā€™m sure there are many answers :wink: but Iā€™m asking to just get us to think bigger. If we offered a very strong service (e.g. running workshops at conferences) we could pay for travel expenses for the speakers. Weā€™d evaluate speakers to maintain quality.

The other would be to consider what projects could we fund Ink&Switch style?

  • Create a UX testing harness with a respected tool and help projects use it.
  • Fund a UX designer to do a strategic fly-by for a project
  • Fund a UX audit

Teams would have to apply, theyā€™d have to really want this. But the EU is leaning heavily into open source and offering a way to make open source better feels aligned with itā€™s goals. I realize this is aggressive, but if we offer enough value, we could actually atract funding (eventually, it would take a long time to make this happen).

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Myself and a few other open source design folks who I will not name for their own privacy have been in talks with EU funding consortiums and organize regularly.

Folks like the sovereign tech agency and their pilot for a EU wide fund, expanding the maintainer fund beyond code maintenance, looking at formats like the commons caretakers model for supporting OSS. These conversations are happening and open source design work is happening in that way, just not under the community umbrella of open source design.

If it was easy to get funding, open source design would have it by now but the world and the wider free and open source ecosystem that do not sell a service or product are struggling to find funding for core development and security. At a GitHub even I was at and at CHAOSS con and all across fosdem funding is difficult to grasp. Funding also isnā€™t the entire problem here and I donā€™t think weā€™re trying to build a cooperative model type agency for design in open source.

But yes if you have a spare 100k then we could look at doing these things and Iā€™d be excited to see you manage and lead them

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Two and a half goals, small and pretty doable, I guess.

  • Connect open source designers
    • Challenge: Projects tend to be relatively isolated
    • Activity: More active social media presence
    • Activity: Active outreach to projects
  • Spread and teach appropriate methods
    • Challenge: Most UX methods are for larger, well-resource projects
    • Activity: Create learning materials for methods like heuristic reviews, reviewing (micro) copy, small scale informal testing (this would be contractable for an okay amount of money
  • my 0.5 goal: Collect and support research in Open Source and Design
    • Challenge: A lot of disconnected ideas about open source design (the activity)
    • Activity: Read, collect and summarized existing research. We already have this review and that list
    • Activity: Potentially give guidance and consultation for people who want to reserach in that field.
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Hi Scott,

I am a little perplexed by your frustration I can read between the lines of your post, considering OSD is a loosely defined collective made out of volunteers. You have been around for many years so I hope we can move out of the ā€œideaā€ space into the space where people might pick up responsibilities and propose solutions and prototypes, beyond ideas.

Honestly, if youā€™d have framed your proposals in a manner which invited for collaboration and improvement rather than entitlement of knowing how to do it better, your suggestions would come to fruition, I am positive.

The website redesign has been going on for some time now and many initiatives have been started, please pick up something you care about and be the change you want to see. I am sure there are things to be done which are still respectful of the time of volunteers. There really is no difference between you, me and everyone else here on this forum.

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A post was split to a new topic: A structured way to discuss design in open source

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I second Elioā€™s and Eriolā€™s thoughts!