Open Source Design – Governance and Organization project
searching
2026-03-31
Governance, design, community building, support, documentation, research,
Governance, documentation, user/stakeholder interviews, research, project support,

Example deliverables to be defined and confirmed by those selected for the work:

1. Review, understand and document the history of OSD and it’s previous and current ways of governance and decision making
       a. Conduct interviews/conversations with community members across varied intensity of involvement and time spent in the community
       b. Read, summarize etc. existing governance and governance-like documents/information and analyze gaps, challenges and areas for clarity/improvement

2. Compile learning’s into a digestible format for FLOSS/OSS and Design individuals to understand

3. Map stories, learning’s and explorations from the OSD community to possible interventions, changes, structures and process to be tested/prototyped by the community to see it’s effectiveness

4. Wherever appropriate, make content and process open and transparent as per FLOSS/OSS principles.
paid

Please see this document for the full job description: https://cloud.opensourcedesign.net/s/Ly6WTWYg4Gn5aQT

Open Source Design (OSD) is a community of designers and developers pushing for more open design processes and improving the user experience and interface design of open-source software.

OSD received funding to explore and evolve the governance, decision making and organizational structure of the OSS community project. We expect some open sourced documents/writing to be published, some updates/information to be documented on our Github organisations/repositories and research documents to be produced.

We are looking for support in exploring and understanding governance broadly for Open Source Design. You can find some background details in this repo https://github.com/Erioldoesdesign/open-source-design-community-governance/blob/main/the-state-of-open-source-designs-community-and-governance.md

We’re looking for people with experience of governance processes and decision making across volunteer communities to carry out research and discussions that lead to an understanding of where OSD’s governance and decision making can be added to, changed and improved in order to build and implement a resilient, sustainable, equitable and respectful process that can ensure OSD’s community can clearly understand what and why the community focuses on, with what resources and have clear pathways to connection and contribution.

We’re asking for simple indicators of interest from people wanting to take on this work in the form of either written answers to the following questions or any other formats (audio/video) that the applicants may find more comfortable.

Question 1: Have you any public examples of helping community groups through governance and decision making process that you can share or any brief descriptions you can offer?

Question 2: Briefly (no more than 200-500 written words) describe your thoughts on approaching this work from what you’ve read in this project posting so far? What questions/challenges come up for you about the nature of this work and how do you intend to explore those?

Please don’t send an overwhelming amount of information or evidence. We want to see how you respond to these questions and not benchmark based on impressive sounding prior clients. Please keep clarifying questions to a single email thread if needed. If we have follow up questions or clarifications we’ll reach out for or additional information. Please do not request calls with any of the OSD members about this work.

Applications will be assessed based on the answers to the above questions and evidence of public example/s from question one. The OSD governance committee of 5+ people will assess these via private discussion.

Applications will close on 15th of May 2026

Candidates will receive feedback by June 15th 2026