What's up with Job Postings?

I’ve just browsed the jobs board and noticed that everyone that includes a link to their project comes out a bit borked, e.g.

How to apply:
[“dkozel@gnuradio.org or their matrix chat rooms (#gnuradio:gnuradio.org #website:gnuradio.org #grc-dev:gnuradio.org)”, “”]

As this has happened more than once, it implies there is a problem with the job posting form, not the people posting. Is this a known issue? Is there a way to fix this?

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Looks like this has been an issue for a while. Here’s a Github issue discussing it: Job rendering broken · Issue #166 · opensourcedesign/opensourcedesign.github.io · GitHub

Clearly no rush to fix it. If Job Postings are important to opensourcedesign.net, I’d think this would be a higher priority.

Not sure how priorities are managed in this community as I am only an infrequent visitor. Maybe @Erioldoesdesign has more background? But if you think this is important to get fixed, you can also comment on that Github issue to bring more awareness to it.

Oh it definitely is a high priority @scottjenson but as @GBKS says, all of Open Source Design are volunteers with various day jobs, families, other OSS projects/community work, etc. and only a few of the most active people have front-end coding skills and have deployed the local environment to push FE code to improve the jobs section.

We also try to practice what we ‘preach’ and have an open and collaborative design process. We did this with design recommendations for the homepage recently which is in this figma file it took a while and a very long (but inclusive!) forum post about featured projects and who would maintain and update that, manifesto, goals, etc. etc.

Turns out open, accessible, inclusive and sociocratic process take a while, which isn’t a bad thing, just means that time happens.

I personally would love to push an effort on the jobs posting pages and I’m starting by cataloging all the still ‘open’ posts and contacting the original posters but we certainly could do with these roles and support:

  • Rallying FE devs to help code
  • Starting a shared design file (Figma or Penpot.app) to collab design the jobs page
  • Cleaning up old github issues around jobs page and checking they have what we need Jobs issues here

Just as an FYI my Figma team for Open Source Design is tied to my university email so you might need to put in Newcastle University UK’s URL in to gain access :slight_smile:

@Erioldoesdesign I totally agree with you on this. Let’s take a look into this and I will try and help with the frontend fixes to show the links in a better way.

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I’d been thinking it would be cool to have that handled with automatic mails. Additionally, posts could automatically ‘close’ after the post has been inactive for two weeks or so, unless the poster refreshes it–perhaps with a button in the email, or in the forum thread. This would require a one month notice or such for older posts, and a note in the job creating page for newer posts. Another alternative would be that they automatically close if the job poster themselves don’t interact with the thread for longer than two weeks.

Edit: I see that you’re already doing something like that :stuck_out_tongue: Should’ve checked the link first

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Link related issues in Job Posting has been fixed. We will discuss more on how to make a better representation of the job posting based on the data collected from the Job Form

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Because this post was the “kick up the butt” I needed to get on the Jobs Page work :stuck_out_tongue: I started a couple of tasks

  1. Cataloged all the job postings and their status and whether they can be closed (removed from the list) PR’s here
  2. Started emailing/messaging all people affiliated with job postings that might not be able to be ‘closed’.
  3. Started the Figma file for re-designing the jobs page (I wanted to do this in PenPot but we need to do some migration of layouts and homepage design to do that) Here’s the Figma File

That Figma file is in an OSD Figma team I created under my university educational account if anyone wants to add to the team so they can edit the designs.

I’m gonna try to chip away at the jobs listing page tasks and the jobs form but generally, we need clarity for both job posters and designers wanting to fill jobs. Theres a number of things I observed hile going through every job post ever :joy:

  1. Many projects give emails or issue links/repos but plenty of designers still reply to forum threads wanting to contribute. We need a clear and single way for designers to start the job process and it needs to be super clear for the job poster that they need to engage in X way with designers.
  2. We could encourage a discourse forum post immediately after the job post PR is accepted to get better responses.
  3. Deadlines are really useful for our own admin purposes. Some job posts have them included but I think it’d be good to ask job posters for an idea of deadline.

There’s loads more but we can collab on our thoughts here and/or in Figma!

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Sometimes I feel like they need some type of design consultation/talk before they put up a post–perhaps a prompt like “Don’t know what your project needs? Consider…”. Could be a call, an article, or other resources–something to help them integrate design into their project, akin to what’s discussed in A rough process for facilitating an open source design project

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We’re definitely exploring the option of “Don’t know what your project needs? Consider…”
:smiley:

I’ve started to design for this in the Figma file I made for ideas on the jobs page re-design:Figma

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At frogdesign we had a one day bootcamp for startups and before they even showed up, we had them fill out a deck, asking a range of questions, screenshots, etc. It was a lot of work, but they understood it was the prework necessary for a concentrated day workshop.

We could have a much lighter process with a checklist of things to consider (e.g. “Are you only asking for Icons?”) or even suggested design tasks for them to ask about (e.g “Do you have a Journey Map for your product?”) The goal being to give them a range of UX activities they could be asking for.

Sounds like Eriol has already started this which is great news!

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BTW, as a prototype process (not scalable longer term) I’m willing to have a phone call with each company that wants to post. The idea being to help them setup the posting to appeal to as many UX folk as possible. It could also be a good opportunity to do a little UX research on the side to see where each project is wrt UX and what are longer term needs. Of course, I’d write up my learnings (in aggregate of course) to share and discuss with the broader group.

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Neat!

How do we contribute to the design? Through comments, or some sort of “forking”?

On the Figma file? I can give you access to our Figma ‘team’ if you’re happy sharing your email with me and then you can make copies in the figma file and come up with design ideas and treatments!

The current one in there is just my noodling ideas currently :smiley:

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Some sort of interactive/programmatic form is an interesting idea to explore–job posters could get different options to proceed based on how they answered the previous questions. The learnings gathered from the initial calls would serve as a good basis to decide goes into the form.

I was thinking we’d keep it simple at first. Just 2-3 phone calls to learn a bit more. A simple FAQ page might be plenty. If we get frisky, we could try an interactive form but I worry we’re getting too complicated (for the payoff)

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@Erioldoesdesign the Figma file looks great! Left a few comments.

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Of course. That would be something for down the line–I’m just throwing out ideas :stuck_out_tongue:

We can try to use the jitsi room for these calls but we’ll need to think about how and who is notified when someone ‘books’ a session. We could use calendly and a calendar but I wonder if there’s a Nextcloud OSS way of doing this?