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.
Personally i would like to see Open Source Design do the following:
And finally, continue to talk, support, debate, encourage, speak, offer eahc other mutual aid, and just survive as designers in OSS.
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 canât of course single-handedly fix this: how can successfully bring the UX excellence into the open-source ecosystem?
1. Make UX âbiggerâ 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 âGetting Startedâ section that may include articles weâve 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? Iâm sure there are many answers 
but Iâm 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. Weâd evaluate speakers to maintain quality.
The other would be to consider what projects could we fund Ink&Switch style?
Teams would have to apply, theyâd 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 itâs 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).
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 isnât the entire problem here and I donât think weâre 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 Iâd be excited to see you manage and lead them
Two and a half goals, small and pretty doable, I guess.
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 âideaâ space into the space where people might pick up responsibilities and propose solutions and prototypes, beyond ideas.
Honestly, if youâd 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.
A post was split to a new topic: A structured way to discuss design in open source
I second Elioâs and Eriolâs thoughts!
Thank you for that thoughtful reply. I completely appreciate the challenges youâve highlighted; having navigated the grant application process for FOSS myself, I recognize that grant money is quite scarce. My previous comments were intended to be more of a strategic exercise in vision-setting. I believe that even, and perhaps especially, when funding is scarce, it is vital for us to articulate exactly what we would hope to achieve if those resources were available.
Ultimately, my goal was to suggest that defining a compelling, unified vision is a necessary first step. Not only does it help us clarify why we are here, but it also creates the foundation needed to make a persuasive case to potential supporters in the future.
For me, OSD would really help me by
Convincing projects one by one is hard. Having resources to link toâŚ
@fnetX I wonder what resources would help to argue for design in open source. Such resources wonât convince people who are against design or newcomers in their community, but would need to target a critical but interested person. I wonder what information or argument they are typically find helpful!
resources that are freely available and are easy to apply to open source projects.
Do you find something like this helpful?: How To Test Software For Usability And Usefulness When You Havenât Finished Writing The Code (just trying to find what would be good by giving an example)
We are on that! I wrote a couple of articles that would go in such a section on the website (currently living on our nextcloud).
I was thinking of success stories and things like âtips for developers to accept design contributionsâ. Of course this requires some effort to develop, but it is what Iâd like to see, and I would also like to help.
Also, I wonder if projects could be better connected. For example, a âdesign pledgeâ in one or two directions:
I considered doing such a pledge (list of projects) myself for a long time already. I think that it has benefits doing it as OSD though, because it might be easier to gather a list of designers who are interested in contributing to the same project.
It would be different from the job board: more long-term and once per project, not for specific tasks.
Do you find something like this helpful?
Yes, probably. I liked some of the reads from Resources - Open Source Design, but they are very low in the list and some of them are no longer found. As someone just starting to design, I am overwhelmed by the long list of other projects (especially because most links donât lead me to a âthis is how we do designâ, but to the general project landing page with no mention of design). The signal/noise ratio on that page is terrible. Cleaning it up would be great.
Just adding: I think it would also help to explain some design terms and somehow cluster the âdesignâ into different areas.
Coming from technology, there is a lot of domain-specific knowledge. You usually do not identify as a âdeveloperâ but focus on e.g. backend, websites, embedded applications etc.
Personally, I am not that much into visual design. But I have to scroll through the list of CSS gradients, colour schemes and icon packs until I find a guide to user research and UX. And I can imagine that other people feel the opposite.
An idea to make this more concrete: I though of interviews about UX practices via mail with projects â which would generate a blog post that could be both posted at our website and at a their project site. This avoids saying that some project is âgoodâ in the abstract (about which many other people will think that they are just in a different situation than their project) and instead (hopefully) shows concrete practices and challenges that other project can identify with and might want to try themselves.
Draft of a draft of an Open Source Design Missionette.
How could we make this in 50 words or less?
Itâs never been easier to do too much.
In the draft for the new website that currently sits on the nextcould (if community members need an account, PM) we wrote:
We are a community of designers and developers who want to improve the usability and design of open-source software and learn from each other.