Events | Open Source Design

Help fund the recordings of talks for FOSS Backstage Design 2026

Eriol Fox & Core Open Source Design team — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Date: March 2026

Location: Berlin, Germany

a photo of the speakers podium from FOSS Backstage Design 2026

FOSS Backstage Design took place for the 3rd year in a row to bring together people working on the user experience of open source software.

FOSS Backstage Design is the place to meet designers, UX-experts, OpenSource enthusiasts, product managers and people generally interested in UX, accessible design and usability.

This year however, was harder to raise sponsorship for the event. As such, the cost of the video recordings for the talks on the day were at risk of not being funded.

The folks at Plain Schwartz, who are organizing many FOSS events stepped in to take on the cost of recordings of talks.

Open Source Design covered a part of the venue and catering costs for the 2nd and 3rd year in a row, but as a community run project on donations we cannot cover the 3000 Euro amount for the excellent level of professional recording, audio and editing that is offered by the team that Plain Schwartz hires.

Please consider donating what you can to help Plain Schwartz recover the costs to record the talks here:

https://opencollective.com/opensourcedesign/projects/foss-backstage-design

You can look forward to seeing the excellent talks about open source software and design related topics, from Blender, Mastodon, AWS and KDE in the coming weeks on their YouTube channel soon as well as an article write up here on Open Source Design’s articles section too!: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainSchwarzUG

dalai and pablo speaking at foss backstage 2026

lauwri speaking at foss backstage 2026

imani speaking at foss backstage 2026

andy speaking at foss backstage 2026

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

FOSDEM 2026: Open Source Design Devroom wrap up

Eriol Fox — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 1 February 2026

Location: Université Libre Brussels, Belgium

A photo from towards the end of the open source design devroom day

Introduction

The 12th edition Open Source Design devroom in 2026 ran for a half a day on Sunday 1st of February from 13.00pm until the end of the conference at 17.00pm with 8 talks. Most talks had a good/full turn out of audience numbers in the room, even right up until the end of the day on Sunday, which is typically when many folks start travel home from Brussels.

Each talk followed the same format as years previously, 20 minutes each with 5 minutes for questions, and again, many talks could have been much longer and delved into the details and nuances of topic like security, privacy, supply chain safety, design systems and collaboration processes. In recent years we’ve applied for full days of a devroom which would either mean longer talks from some speakers or more speakers. This year we received over 30 talk proposals. Which have their speaker and OSS project information anonymised so that the core maintainer team can vote on the quality of the topic and mitigate bias towards familiar people and OSS projects. We only received a half day in 2026 which means shorter talks and less speakers but as the interest for open source design grows we’ll continue to apply for more time and attention to the varied and broad aspects of design in OSS.

All the talks were recorded and will be available on their individual pages on the FOSDEM website. https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/design/ (this website will be archived once FOSDEM 2026’s website is live. When that happens please search for ‘FOSDEM 2026’ in a search engine and look for the archived site)

You can also find every design devroom from 2015 onwards by visiting the yearly specific website of FOSDEM e.g. https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/track/open_source_design/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/track/open_source_design/ etc.

In 2026 we did struggle to include talks with accessibility as a critical component as well and also endeavoured to platform and prioritise speakers from traditionally under-represented geographical locations but as FOSDEM is an free to attend conference, each devroom organiser, should they want to pay for speakers and volunteers would need to fundraise. This year we were able to use limited funds of $550 USD to pay for two speakers partial travel/accommodation costs. If you’d like to contribute to 2027’s travel funds for FOSDEM and/or other conference costs for open source design related events and conferences you can do so on our open collective funds page: https://opencollective.com/opensourcedesign

The Talks

Designing attestations UI: The Security and Safety of OSS package supply chain - Eriol Fox

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/HCQRVT-designing_attestations_ui_the_security_and_safety_of_oss_package_supply_chain/

The speaker worked on a 12+ week project looking at how to express in the varied UI’s of three package repositories (npm, pypi and RubyGems) we can now see more clearly what developers, across skill and knowledge levels, use in package repository pages to make a decision on the security of an OSS located on a registry. These decisions are critical for better understanding trust, value, social proof and the knowledge of secure practices across developers and helps answer the question: how much do developers know about the security of their software supply chain?

You can take a look at the project repository here: https://github.com/ossf/wg-securing-software-repos/tree/main/docs/attestations-style-guide

The UI Layer of Security: What could go wrong? - Elio Qoshi & Anja Xhakani

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/YTN9QV-ui-layer-of-security/

The speakers took the audience on a journey into the rarely looked at the parts of technology systems from a security perspective that is the clicking the buttons and interpreting the warnings part. A surprising number of real-world security failures happen not because the code is flawed, but because the interface leaves too much room for dangerous misunderstandings. The speakers touch on what the common mistakes are when the people that build and configure technology assume that users are fully aware of risks and nuances involved in operating the technology. This knowledge/understanding gap can lead to critical user security risks.

The speakers draw on their work at Ura with security-critical and open source projects, this talk explores how the user experience itself can introduce or amplify security risks and why these issues often slip through traditional code-focused reviews.

Designing For Trust and Safety In the Age of Predatory Technology - Caroline Sinders

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PRLSR3-designing_for_safety_in_the_age_of_predatory_tech/

This speaker goes deep into what online safety looks like in the age of Grok, misinformation, doxxing, and technology company founders imposing their own views of safety, surveillance, and ethics on their platforms. The speaker is a former trust and safety employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, and an online gender based violence expert with over a decade of experience,. They cover new design patterns, best practices, and product tooling to help achieve safety, security and foster trust for all types of communities online, but especially marginalized and vulnerable ones.

Parts of the talk focuses on how open source design can be a part of the solution space for creating safety, and how transparency, security and privacy should be leveraged for safety online. The speaker finishes with actionable design insights, UX, UI, new types of product design, and design related policy that could be implemented all for safety.

Gephi Lite: We Built a Data Visualization Tool, But We Couldn’t Design It - Alexis Jacomy & Desaintjan Arthur

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/UKTJ3V-gephi-lite-redesign/

The speakers talk about Gephi Lite which is a web-based open-source network visualization tool built by a three-person engineering team. After two years of development and a functional application the team had a nagging feeling that the user interface wasn’t working for users. After bringing in Arthur Desaintjan, a design intern the Gephi Lite team were able to address the needs for usable interface fro users. The speakers share how they approached design at a pivotal moment in Gephi Lite’s life - first by stepping back to clarify what Gephi Lite should really be, then by running user interviews that revealed just how far our assumptions were from reality.

Design Systems in Open Source - Andres Betts

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/ANP9VX-design_systems_in_open_source/

The speaker takes us through how Design systems evolved their process and how UI graphics are made, full with automation and deep integration. They then contrast this industry view with their experiences of Open Source communities, who are often left out of these design system processes and practices given that OSS are for certain subset of OSS user groups. The speaker then speaks about how using PenPot, for KDE Plasma and how they saw an opportunity to build something unique to develop the Plasma desktop faster and with higher fidelity to user experience standards. The speaker takes us through the implementation at the KDE Plasma Desktop from graphics, colors, typography, graphical components to much more.

You Don’t Need to Be a Designer to Design: Fixing UX in Open Source - Archita Gorle

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/Y7HLDE-you_dont_need_to_be_a_designer_to_design_fixing_ux_in_open_source/

The speaker starts with speaking to how Open source thrives on contributions from developers, testers, and community builders, but how design often gets left behind, especially when there are fewer designer in the FOSS ecosystem than people who write code.

The good news: you don’t need a design degree do design. You might start with ‘I see the problem, but I’m not a designer’ and look for the methods to help, which the speaker then explains some simple, practical design methods to identify and solve UX issues in open source projects. This talk focuses on the simple steps anyone can try and how to ask the right questions, sketch ideas on paper, and try them out with friends or community members. No special skills or software needed: just curiosity and a willingness to make things easier for others.

Understanding developer needs - User research in Forgejo - Otto Richter

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/EXQFAR-forgejo-developer-centric-user-needs-and-design/

This speaker, who themselves started out on the code/software side of an OSS project and themselves began to engage with user research and UX work when they saw opportunities for improvement in the project they were affiliated with. This speaker helped the audience to understand your OSS users and how that understanding should be an important step of software development. In recent years, many end-user facing FLOSS communities integrated at least some aspects of design into their development. Unfortunately, most developer-centric projects still haven’t started to even think about it. This talk concludes two years of user research in Forgejo, a Git-backed software forge and collaboration platform. Forgejo can be self-hosted or used on a public instance like Codeberg.org to create software together, from sharing and reviewing code to tracking user problems, doing project management and doing design work.

Use eye tracking to figure out usability issues, the open source way - Dmitriy Kostiuk

Watch this talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/FS8F3U-use_eye_tracking_to_figure_out_usability_issues_the_open_source_way/

The speaker dives into the usage of eye trackers to track usability issues in FLOSS. The speaker introduces different eye-tracker tools and process and shows detailed examples showing the different data and information that can be captured by using eye-tracking and what insight that offers to an FLOSS project. Like seeing whether a user looks at written content or quickly uses a search function on a documentation page.

Visualization of short-term and long-term eye tracking data series is explained with sample code for Graphviz and GNU Octave.

What the audience said…

Feedback this year was again, glowing and kind with attendees of talks valuing specifically the focus on critical topics in OSS like security and privacy and not just the highly valued aspects that are expected by designers in regards to the UX and usability, but the growing interest in cryptography and package security. The talks that also welcomed broad participation into design in OSS were highly rated as design can often seem like a practice that can only be done by the trained few, but Archita and Otto’s talks emphasised how design and user research can be invested in many ways but different folks in OSS to the benefit of OSS projects. The designers in the room were energised by the depth in the topics of design systems and eye tracking and after the talks there were many new to OSS designers looking for pathways into contribution to OSS.

if you’d like to send us a review or quote from your experience of the FOSDEM Open Source Design devroom please email us on core(at)opensourcedesign(dot)net - feedback, compliments and critique is how we keep our volunteer energy up year on year and we always hope to improve experiences of people at FOSDEM as best we can.

You can also email us if you’d like to be involved in the Open Source Design Devroom as a volunteer next year. We always need help with the following:

Applying for the FOSDEM devroom and stand in September/October every year Promoting the call for talks to people in the open source design space Helping up develop fundraising processes for travel stipends and raising funds to distribute to speakers and volunteers Communications and liaising with selected speakers ensuring they have their talks prepared and everything they need to attend FOSDEM in Brussels. Volunteering in the Devroom at FOSDEM in Brussels. Hosting the room, Introducing speakers, tech and audio support, ensuring the room is safe and space is monitored and cleanup. Preparing banners, posters and stickers for handing out to attendees.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Call for Participation: Open Source Design Devroom at FOSDEM 2026

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 31 January & 1 February 2026

Time: Sunday 1 February 2026 13.00 - 17.00

Location: Université Libre Brussels, Belgium

Please see the bottom of this article for the call for proposals link.

FOSDEM is the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting, a free and non-commercial two-day weekend event that offers all open source contributors a place to meet, share ideas, learn and collaborate. Every year, thousands of free and open source software contributors from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels, Belgium. After the success of open source design at previous FOSDEM’s, we are gearing up for the next edition of FOSDEM, taking place at the Université Libre Brussels on 31 January & 1 February 2026.

Open Source Design @ FOSDEM

Open Source Design has been part of FOSDEM for over a decade now! giving designers who work with or contribute to free, libre and open source software (FLOSS) a platform to share their ideas. You can find the link to our devroom here where talks will be annouced once they have been submitted and accepted. The timings and room will also be updated here too. https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/design/

Travel support

Open Source Design has limited fund to support travel, accomodation and expenses for speakers and can be found on our open collective page. We will be prioritising under-represented members of the FOSS community with these travel funds and can offer invitation letters for visas. Please send an email to core@opensourcedesign.net to be considered for travel stipend support.

Get involved!

We invite you to give a talk about contributing design to open source projects!

“Design” can mean anything including typography, graphic design, interaction design, user experience, human-computer interaction, accessibility, information architecture, content strategy, service design, user research, design research and more. You don’t have to be an expert in the field – you could have been involved in a project for as little as a year or as long as a decade. As long as you have been involved with design in any respect in an open source project, we’re interested to hear what you think!

Here are some topics that may inspire your talk:

Your experiences contributing to design in an open source project
How you use FLOSS tools to design
An open source project which is an example of great design
Your design process, research methods, and go-to resources while working with open source projects
Your ideas on fostering diversity and inclusion in design and open source
Anything else related to design and FLOSS!

Some examples of previous talks featured at the Open Source Design devroom at FOSDEM are:

Thunderbird: Building a Cross-Platform, Scalable Open-Source Design System Laurel Terlesky at FOSDEM 2025

CLI Design for Designers and Developers Hartmut Obendorf at FOSDEM 2025

The Engineer’s Guide to Design: Merging Technical and Creative Skills in Open Source Projects Khushi Garg at FOSDEM 2025

Reimagining Personal Computing with E ink: Community Insights and Design Challenges by Alexander Soto at FOSDEM 2024

Liquid Prompt: yes, we can drastically rethink the design of a shell prompt by nojhan at FOSDEM 2024

Bad UX is Bad Security: Adventures in Qubes OS UX Design by Marta Marczykowska-Górecka at FOSDEM 2024

Penpot 2.0 is here! by Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz at FOSDEM 2024

Accessibility & Open Source: How open source is key to building a more inclusive world by Mike Gifford at FOSDEM 2023

Documenting a Design System: Lessons learned from open sourcing the Orbit docs by Aaron Collier at FOSDEM 2022

Open Source Design movement in Africa by Peace Ojemeh at FOSDEM 2020

What is the talk format?

In 2026, all talks at the Open Source Design devroom would be in-person and recorded/streamed. You will have the stage for 25 minutes in total, so you can have a 20-minute talk with 5 minutes for questions from the audience, or a 25-minute talk with no questions. Talks cannot be longer than 25 mins otherwise you get gently moved off ‘stage’. If you have a longer talk that is interactive, we can consider allocating you 45 minutes for two talk slots but this is a rare likihood.

How can I submit a talk?

Talk submissions will be sent directly to FOSDEM’s Pretalx system. Submissions for talks must select ‘Open Source Design’ under ‘Track’. https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2026/cfp

There the Open Source Design Core Maintainer team will review talks and accept and reject. We should have space for around 6 20 min talks in the afternoon. You can request a certain time slot, earlier in the afternoon or later in the afternoon but please be aware this will be on a first come first serve basis and subsequent changes once given a slot must be discussed with the other speaker you want to swap with. Additionally we need you to be in the room for 15-20 mins before your talk (or attend the talk before hand) as the room can get quite full and it’s hard to set you up as a speaker if you’re stuck outside the room.

We’re investigating how we can fund a sign language interpreter or live captioning for 2026. To help fund this or discuss what you can offer in terms of support please contact core@opensourcedesign.net

What’s the deadline?

Submission of talks must be done by the end of November 2025

Accepted talks would be announced latest in December 2025.

All deadlines are 23:59 UTC. If your talk is accepted, an Open Source Design volunteer will keep in touch with you to help you meet deadlines and with any technical difficulties you may face.

Additional information

Be sure to read the FOSDEM Code of Conduct.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

FOSS Backstage 2025: wrap up

Eriol Fox — Tue, 13 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 10–12 March 2025

Location: Berlin, Germany

FOSS Backstage 2025 wrap up recap

Open Source Design @ FOSS Backstage

signs outside of FOSS Backstage's venue entrance

FOSS Backstage in 2025 has now been running since 2017 and FOSS Backstage Design is now in its second year. FOSS backstage is held in Berlin (and online) typically in early March and in 2025 it was held on March 10th and 11th and FOSS Backstage Design was on the 12th of March 2025.

This year, Open Source Design was able to support FOSS Backstage Design by using our community open collective fund to ensure the day had the same venue as FOSS Backstage’s main track. You can find more information about the costs on our Open Collective page as well as discussed in our monthly community meeting and the FOSS Backstage organisers maintained a forum thread in the lead up to the event

As for the decision to spend our funds this way, there were extensive discussions held by the core maintainer team in a group chat we maintain privately from the wider community in order to discuss any matters that would require secure conversations (e.g. so as not to risk leaking login information etc.) There were mixed views on supporting these costs but ultimately, when asked the majority of active core team maintainers for open source design as well as the wider community members asked in Jan 2025 / Feb 2025’s community meetings were in favour of Open Source Design using it’s collected funds to ensure that this event had a venue that was accessible to those that wanted to attend. Offering this funding also allowed us to speak a little on open source design’s mission and goals as a community to the audience in attendance and show public support for any organisation holding meetings, events and conferences that platform design in open source and open source design in the FOSS community.

This articles author (Eriol Fox) self-funded their own attendance to FOSS Backstage 2025 and FOSS Backstage Design 2025 so that they could write this article for Open Source Design’s community and also ensure that Open Source Design Community was represented at the event. Eriol is also part of the Program Committee of FOSS Backstage and has been for 2 years.

Read the recap from the FOSS Backstage conference organisers here

a speaker and the tech behind the speaker

The design talks for FOSS backstage

This year FOSS Backstage not only ran a day of design (FOSS Backstage Design) but also had a number of design talks throughout the main 2 day conference. These talks included topics around the usability of critical civic crisis technologies, how OSS organisations are understanding and building out their design processes for the wider community, the importance of cultural contexts with language orientation, design for command line interfaces and how open source designers are building out community learning resources so that more designers can be onboarded into OSS contribution.

Building Resilience:UX Strategies for Crisis-Responsive Tech by Miruna Muscan

Miruna shares the story behind Commit Global’s legal guidance module, designed from the ground up to address the urgent needs of refugees at the Ukrainian border. Built with inclusive UX principles, The legal guidance tool adapts to evolving needs in real time, making complex information accessible and straightforward. Through live testing, human-centered design, and research on the ground, Commit Global developed a humanitarian digital framework that doesn’t just respond to user needs, but rather it anticipates them. One of the key elements of Miruna’s talk is about how technology that really helps people is rarely the ‘cutting edge’ or trendy technology but rather technology that is user focused.

Watch Miruna Muscan’s talk here

Bridging the Gap Between Designers & Open Source Communities by Nina Rojc, Leia Ruffini, Kola Ojoodide

Nina, Leia and Kola explore the challenges of design contribution in open source projects and the issues faced by designers and maintainers. They conducted a survey with both designers and open source maintainers, as well as in-depth interviews with several designers to get a closer look at their experiences. In the talk they share key findings, including the biggest obstacles designers face - like the intimidating nature of contribution platforms, confusing documentation, and a lack of clear entry points. They then move onto practical strategies to overcome these challenges. These findings then inform work that the team hopes to share widely with the OSS community in order to alleviate some of the challenges identified in the surveys and interviews across the research.

Watch Nina, Leia and Kola’s talk here

Right-to-Left, Left-to-Right: Rethinking Multilingual Design by Batool Almarzouq, Goodnews Sunday Sandy, Richie Moluno

Batool, Goodnews and Richie detailed the importance of careful and considerate design of multilingual technologies. When designers create interfaces without an understanding how these interfaces are used and read in a language with a right-to-left reading direction like Arabic , there will be minor misunderstandings at best and a completely unusable technology/interface at worst. In addition, “default”, english-based text display and critical UI interaction elements can mislead a user (e.g. a ‘back’ button being placed in a top left or left hand side of the screen from left-to-right users). These default placements mean that those reading right-to-left are working harder to ‘figure out’ the logic of left-to-right reading and contexts. This talk is a must watch for those interested in fully inclusive design across languages.

Watch Batool, Goodnews and Richie’s talk here

Open Design Guide by Christoph Ono, Eriol Fox

This talk introduced the opendesign.guide which is a project created and maintained by designers across the bitcoin design community. The purpose of the open design guide grew from the speakers spending time over the years mentoring and supporting designers new to OSS to get into contributing. Both the speakers wished that there were public and comprehensive resources to help them through the mentoring process but writing guides and resources about how OSS works and how you can contribute design to OSS is nuanced and specific to each designer. Most of the problems then, with writing guides, is that a guide written by one designer about their perspective will not be broad enough for the wider OSS community. With the Open Design Guide, AI was used to write the first version and then it was edited, improved and built upon by holding ‘reading group’ community calls.

Watch Christoph and Eriol’s talk here

Designing is for GUIs only? CLI Design as a shared practice by Hartmut Obendorf

OSS projects are used to not having a designer. What would you ask one if you had them available? To look at your Command Line Interface? (CLI) This is exactly what you should do! In this talk, Hartmut goes into depth about how information architecture and conceptual architecture is critical in designing for command line interfaces . This dives deep into the use of ‘experts’ that interact with OSS primarily through prompts in the terminal. The command line is an environment that changes its state continuously, making a good design both important and challenging. Designing for command line interfaces also grapples with the assumption that ‘design’ is not needed, therefore advocating for usability and accessibility in the command line is difficult. Watch this talk to get some great guidance on how to start designing for text-based interfaces.

Watch Hartmut’s talk here

Onboarding Designers into Open Source Projects by Oluwadunsin Emmanuel Omole and Kingsley Mkpandiok

For Open Source Software, developer contributions are essential. While involvement of developers is often thought about, projects are not always prepared to integrate designers. This talk uses CHAOSS, the “Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software”, as a case study, exploring successful strategies used by the CHAOSS Africa design team to create an inclusive and productive environment for designers in open source. We will examine the specific challenges faced when integrating designers into a community primarily driven by developers, such as differing workflows, communication styles, and contribution processes.

Watch Oluwadunsin and Kingsley’s talk here

FOSS Backstage Design signed, sign

The design talks for FOSS Backstage Design

FOSS Backstage Design’s day kicked off with three fantastic talks by Martin Keary, Marta Marczykowska-Górecka and Tobias Bernard. All the speakers presented on common design in OSS topics but from their own unique experiences. There are common themes across the talks, from communication across role divides to both designers and developers getting intensely nerdy about their specific domains. The most common thread being that no matter what you’re contributing to the OSS, you’re there because you support free and open software and ultimately want it to be used, enjoyed and valuable to any user.

Achieving Excellence in Open Source Software Design by Martin Keary

Martin Keary aka Tantacrul kicked off FOSS Backstage Design with a talk that spanned both valuable general insights into design in open source alongside the specifics of designing for complex interfaces like Audacity in a way that is incremental and prioritised users’ quick visual understanding of the UI,reducing ‘pop up’ tools and designing more intuitive ways of expressing functions of an interface that matched the human expectations e.g. changing a ‘click to show toolbar to move an audio snippet’ to a click and drag ‘grabbing hand’ icon.. Martin also speaks to designing digital music notations that were accessible and legible both to advanced and new users with Musescore and some very funny moments from usertesting sessions with artist-users trying to puzzle out certain features in Inkscape.

Watch Martin Keary’s talk here

Beyond Looking Good: How To Talk To Developers About Design by Marta Marczykowska-Górecka

Marta, who is Qubes Manager, takes us through some of her experiences working with OSS developers, hackers and activists from the human rights OSS space. Marta speaks about how she advocates for humans in the OSS tech space, talking about how important communication is in the relationships between designers and developers and how to meet developers where they are at in terms of design understanding. Marta gives us practical advice on how to better connect with OSS developers and how to raise your voice as a designer in OSS.

Watch Marta Marczykowska-Górecka talk here

GNOME Design: A Report From the Trenches by Tobias Bernard

Tobias speaks about designing but also being embedded in the Gnome community. Tobias shows how design in FOSS allows it to break the constraints of only being for ‘nerds and hackers’. This evolves into how the design system for gnome applications has enabled both highly usable, accessible and consistent tools across the Gnome ecosystem while also removing the pain of styling those elements being the responsibility of developers. The design system also simplified the app icon design process through well established styles as well. Tobias goes into detail about the way that the design team are involved in projects in Gnome as well as the processes involved, from mock-up and design libraries to the upstream development.

Watch Tobias Bernard’s talk here

A circle of people discussing open source design topics at the barcamp

The FOSS Backstage Design ‘barcamp’ aka pitch a discussion topic and then vote!

After the talks we move into a ‘barcamp’ afternoon. All attendees had time to write what kinds of conversations and sessions they wanted to see happen for the remainder of the afternoon. These were then voted on and 3 sessions were run in parallel for 3 1 hour time slots. Notes were taken by volunteers and summaries can be found below.

The schedule written on a whiteboard

The selected topics are listed below with some sessions having summary notes and others that were more private do not have summaries

You can read the full collected notes hosted by FOSS Backstage .pdf here

The least you can do: The boring changes that improve UX quickly These tasks are easy to do because they are usually separate from complex coding work. Despite their value, they’re often ignored because they’re not as “exciting” as redesigns or new features. Examples of Small, High-Impact Fixes:

Accessibility (a11y) improvements – Increasing contrast between text and background.
Better labelling – Adding labels to icons, ensuring labels are clear and consistent.
Sharpening icons – Small visual refinements that improve clarity.
Tooltips & microcopy – Filling in missing descriptions to help users.
Consistent terminology – Ensuring naming is logical and standardized across the project.

Examples of Successful design work A private discussion where designers in FOSS projects spoke about projects they’ve had experience with and how they would describe and express ‘success’ in those projects.

Measuring design success in a FOSS project This discussion began with defining what success is or can be within any given OSS project. The discussion then moved on to how hard it is to measure success, communication sometimes stops after the design engagement, so designers don’t have access to feedback. This then moved onto values, principles, metrics and ways of gathering and finding feedback and how to see the bias in feedback.

Harmful UX patterns and their alternatives Various reasons for harmful UX patterns manipulating users like deliberate attempts to manipulate users to satisfy a business goal or accidental ones, because there isn’t enough knowledge/feedback. An example of UX pattern mentioned in one of the talks at FOSS Backstage: Creating addiction (getting people “hooked”).

“Marija: there is a dissonance that weaponizes the general principle of “keeping users engaged”, originally as a metric for product quality, which then becomes an aim to create a dependency, or create growth per se to satisfy shareholders.”

What are good starting points for designers moving into product design to support FOSS? New people need a point of contact – Without guidance, new contributors may not know where to start. Promote experienced community members who can help others get involved and small, achievable, and impactful tasks are ideal for newcomers to FOSS. Open-source repos should be structured clearly so contributors know where to report issues and submit fixes.

Find and rank issues for Penpot enterprise adoption This discussion focused on what we believe Penpot needs to implement to become a fully viable alternative design tooling option for ‘enterprise’ level organisations and companies. These implementations needs included: More options for feedback gathering beyond prototype link sharing and commenting, ways to justify/explain design decisions in designs, branching, approval and merging, tracking the history of design changes, fixing performance issues, implementing design tokens and having a lofi, wireframing mode.

CLI Design for Python One Design challenge is that CLIs are so easy to build for individual teams that it is very hard to create a unified appearance. There are different approaches to CLIs in Linux and no enforcement but could it help to push standards compliance to code-checking tools?

Privacy by design & Adversarial personas for FOSS A conversation that centered on privacy and security in FOSS projects and how those aspects are dealt with across tools/software. How can designers, typically side-lined in privacy and securities ‘deeper’ technical work, better understand how to address these concerns from a design perspective while establishing knowledge and standards for design.

How to be nice to each other in our community Private discussion centering on how to be supportive, collaborative and kind in a ‘scarcity’ environment like OSS and Design in OSS.

All the sticky note topics stuck on the whiteboard with dots to vote on the popular ones

Authors final thoughts

In the ‘post’-covid (is it over really?) era, where we saw many OSS foundations and organisations struggling to maintain already tightening budgets. Who now faces the onslaught of challenges to sustainability and existence across the rapidly changing (for the better?) tech ecosystem. It feels increasingly difficult to find events and communities carving out the space for the less prominent ways of supporting and contributing to OSS - design (and all of ‘designs’ subsidiary practices aka UI, UX, Usability, Accessibility, user research etc.). Maintaining design’s presence and relevancy to OSS continues to feel like pushing a boulder up a hill (in this author’s opinion). But the more we’re able to come together as a community of designers, around our commonalities as both designers in proprietary commercial spaces as well as open source software spaces, we can support the events and communities that support us, support not only our contribution labour, but also our advocacy and relevancy in OSS.

A sticky note that reads 'developers and designers, a match made in heaven/hell?

Credits and thanks

Thanks to the Open Source Design core maintainer team broadly and the wider community for discussing sponsoring FOSS Backstage.

Special thanks to the OSD maintainers and members in attendance Elio Qoshi, Jan Dittrich and Julia Racsko.

Thank you to Plain Schwarz (especially Alex, Paul, Sven & Anne) for organising FOSS Backstage and FOSS Backstage Design.

Thank you to the event photographer Jan Michalko the photos on Flickr can be found here

Written by Eriol Fox Proofread and edited by Jan Dittrich

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

FOSDEM 2025: Open Source Design Devroom wrap up

Eriol Fox — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 1–2 February 2025

Location: Brussels, Belgium

FOSDEM 2025 recap - The Open Source Design community is still going strong!

Introduction

FOSDEM 2025 now marks the eleventh year that Open Source Design have applied for, and been able to run a devroom focused on Open Source, Design and the intersection of these.

The devroom in 2025 ran for a half a day on Sunday from 13.00pm until the end of the conference at 17.00pm. Most talks had a good/full turn out, apart from the one at the end of the day (many folks from overseas head home on Sunday evening!). We had 9 speakers total with 8 talks of 20 minutes each with 5 minutes for questions, though many talks could have been much longer and involved topics and Q&A was full of rich insights, perspective and discussions. All the talks were recorded and will be available on their individual pages on the FOSDEM website. https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/design/ (this website will be archived once FOSDEM 2026’s website is live. When that happens please search for ‘FOSDEM 2025’ in a search engine and look for the archived site)

One aspect of 2025 that this author is particularly proud of, is that we had a majority (7) people that were femme presenting/women speaking (and two masc presenting/men) speak at the Open Source Design devroom. This is a fantastic ratio in terms of diversity of genders to speak at an OSS conference.

The Talks

Design in 5 mins (okay, 20 mins): ecosystem mapping and user research? what is it and how to do it!

Design in 5 mins (okay, 20 mins): ecosystem mapping and user research? what is it and how to do it! Delivered by: Antonia Valencia Caroline Sinders Caroline and Antonia gave insights and personal experiences of how ecosystem maps and user research have benefited the OSS projects that they have been involved in. Including working on user research across a harassment procedure at Wikimedia.

Thunderbird: Building a Cross-Platform, Scalable Open-Source Design System

Thunderbird: Building a Cross-Platform, Scalable Open-Source Design System Delivered by: Laurel Terlesky Laurel walked us through building out the comprehensive and explorative design system for Thunderbird as well the aspirations the team have for more open source design contributions to the tool.

CLI Design for Designers and Developers

CLI Design for Designers and Developers Delivered by: Harmut Obendorf Harmut took us on a journey through the interfaces that developers and coders use and how to ensure that you are optimising the options at your disposal for making these interfaces the best experience for the specific circumstance.

From Accessibility to Inclusion - Interdisciplinary Design

From Accessibility to Inclusion - Interdisciplinary Design Delivered by: Raashi Saxena Raashi takes us through the differences between accessibility and usability, along with ways in which the two complement and support each other in the design of open source tools and the unique opportunities open source communities have for serving disable user needs.

Piracy, and Open Source: Reimagining Creativity

Piracy, and Open Source: Reimagining Creativity Delivered by: Zekun Yang A fantastic personal account from Zekun on her journey as a designer using the proprietary tools pressed upon us as designers and the opportunities and expectations open source design tooling can have on design and designers. Shining light on the cultural differences across countries and the inequalities present in our tools.

Towards Free-Fair-Patterns: Free to Use, Free from Deceptive Patterns, Fair for All

Towards Free-Fair-Patterns: Free to Use, Free from Deceptive Patterns, Fair for All Delivered by: Lorena Sánchez Chamorro Lorena explores the ways in which we practice design in both manipulative and anti-manipulative ways and how we can strive for better treatment of users using fair patterns and ethical interfaces.

The Engineer’s Guide to Design: Merging Technical and Creative Skills in Open Source Projects

The Engineer’s Guide to Design: Merging Technical and Creative Skills in Open Source Projects Delivered by: Khushi Garg Khushi takes us through their experiences from engineer to designer before and during their time at Red Hat as a product designer. Inviting us to better understand the perspectives all roles can bring to the creation and betterment of OSS.

XWiki: Improving web accessibility with respect to backward compatibility

XWiki: Improving web accessibility with respect to backward compatibility Delivered by: Lucas C

Lucas closes the open source design devroom this year by taking us through his journey in making XWiki more accessible without breaking the backwards compatibility of the experience and technology. Quotes from attendees

What the audience said…

This year, many folks approached the volunteers at the devroom with comments, thanks and support requests. Here are some of those quotes from people that came to the OSD devroom:

“I’ve been coming to FOSDEM for 10 years and the open source design devroom is one of the best rooms”

“I’m looking to change from software development to UX design and I didn’t think it was possible until after this Dev room”

“The open source design devroom is one of the most accessible devrooms in terms of topic. I might not understand design in the same way as designers but I can always understand and appreciate the topics in the room”

“I’ve been coming to the open source design devroom for the last 3-4 years and I’m so glad there are other designers doing work in this space and are excited to speak about it”

If you’d like to send us a review or quote from your experience of the FOSDEM Open Source Design devroom please email us on core@opensourcedesign.net - feedback, compliments and critique is how we keep our volunteer energy up year on year and we always hope to improve experiences of people at FOSDEM as best we can.

You can also email us if you’d like to be involved in the Open Source Design Devroom as a volunteer next year. We always need help with the following:

Applying for the FOSDEM devroom and stand in September/October every year
Promoting the call for talks to people in the open source design space
Helping up develop fundraising processes for travel stipends and raising funds to distribute to speakers and volunteers
Communications and liaising with selected speakers ensuring they have their talks prepared and everything they need to attend FOSDEM in Brussels.
Volunteering in the Devroom at FOSDEM in Brussels. Hosting the room, Introducing speakers, tech and audio support, ensuring the room is safe and space is monitored and cleanup.
Preparing banners, posters and stickers for handing out to attendees.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Call for Participation: Open Source Design Devroom at FOSDEM 2025

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 1st February 2025

Time: 13:00 CET

Location: Université Libre Brussels, Belgium

The call for proposals has now closed! please wait until mid December to see the final talks selected! Thank you to everyone who submitted :))))

FOSDEM is the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting, a free and non-commercial two-day weekend event that offers all open source contributors a place to meet, share ideas, learn and collaborate. Every year, thousands of free and open source software contributors from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels, Belgium. After the success of FOSDEM 2024, we are gearing up for the next edition of FOSDEM, taking place at the Université Libre Brussels on 1st and 2nd of February 2025.

Open Source Design @ FOSDEM

Open Source Design has been part of FOSDEM for close to a decade now, giving designers who work with free, libre and open source software a platform to share their ideas. Much like the previous years, Open Source Design will have a devroom at FOSDEM 2025 for the afternoon of Sunday the 2nd of February, and this year it will on the second half of the second day of FOSDEM (13:00pm CET). It will be an in-person event, with a livestream online for the folks who are unable to make it in person.

Get involved!

We invite you to give a talk about contributing design to open source projects!

Here are some topics that may inspire your talk:

Your experiences contributing to design in an open source project
How you use FLOSS tools to design
An open source project which is an example of great design
Your design process, research methods, and go-to resources while working with open source projects
Your ideas on fostering diversity and inclusion in design and open source
Anything else related to design and FLOSS!

Some examples of previous talks featured at the Open Source Design devroom at FOSDEM are:

Thunderbird: Why Visual Change Is Good by Alessandro Castellani at FOSDEM 2024

Reimagining Personal Computing with E ink: Community Insights and Design Challenges by Alexander Soto at FOSDEM 2024

Liquid Prompt: yes, we can drastically rethink the design of a shell prompt by nojhan at FOSDEM 2024

Bad UX is Bad Security: Adventures in Qubes OS UX Design by Marta Marczykowska-Górecka at FOSDEM 2024

Web-accessibility for open-source privacy & security tools by Raashi Saxena at FOSDEM 2024

Penpot 2.0 is here! by Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz at FOSDEM 2024

Accessibility & Open Source: How open source is key to building a more inclusive world by Mike Gifford at FOSDEM 2023

Documenting a Design System: Lessons learned from open sourcing the Orbit docs by Aaron Collier at FOSDEM 2022

Open Source Design movement in Africa by Peace Ojemeh at FOSDEM 2020

What is the talk format?

This year, all talks at the Open Source Design devroom will be in-person and recorded/streamed. You will have the stage for 25 minutes in total, so you can have a 20-minute talk with 5 minutes for questions from the audience, or a 25-minute talk with no questions. Talks cannot be longer than 25 mins otherwise you get gently moved off ‘stage’.

How can I submit a talk?

Link to submit a talk Submissions open on the 30th of October and run until 30th of November 2024.

Talk submissions will be sent directly to FOSDEM’s Pretalx system. Submissions for talks must select ‘Open Source Design’ under ‘Track’.

There the Open Source Design Core Maintainer team will review talks and accept and reject. We should have space for around 6 talks in the afternoon.

What’s the deadline?

Submission of talks must be done by the end of day 30th of November 2024

Accepted talks would be announced latest in December 2024.

All deadlines are 23:59 UTC. If your talk is accepted, an Open Source Design volunteer will keep in touch with you to help you meet deadlines and with any technical difficulties you may face.

Additional information

The Open Source Design devroom at FOSDEM 2025 will be at the Solbosch campus of the Université Libre Brussels, Belgium, the room is k3201 with a capcity of 80 people. Those who want to watch remotely will be able to attend virtually.

Be sure to read the FOSDEM Code of Conduct.

If you have any questions, reach out to us on the Open Source Design forum.

We are looking forward to seeing you at FOSDEM 2025!

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design has a devroom at FOSDEM 2025!

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Saturday & Sunday 1st & 2nd February 2025

Time: 13:00 to 17:00 CET

Location: université Libre Brussels, Belgium

FOSDEM 2025 has been annouced and we are excited for another in-person Open Source Design devroom!

FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels. You don’t need to register. Just turn up and join in!

Join us in Brussels, Belgium for design talks, discussion and fun! Here’s everything you need to know about getting to the Open Source Design devroom at FOSDEM. 🎉

The Open Source Design community groups welcomes and encourages folks from both design and non-design backgrounds to submit talks related to design to the dev room and attend the talks in the devroom. If you’d like a buddy or someone to chat to before joining us you can check out our discourse forum.

The call for proposals is now closed and the round of reviews by the open source design core team has started! If you submitted you’ll get a notification of acceptance or rejection in early to mid December 2024 but no later than December 15th. You’ll then be paired with a volunteer to help you prepare for the conference if you need.

The call for proposals/talks opens on the 30th of October 2024. Find more info about submitting a talk here: opensourcedesign.net/events/2024-10-23-fosdem-cfp-2025 We will close the call for proposals/talks on November 30th 2024 will go through a round of reviews by the open source design core team and you’ll get a notification of acceptance or rejection in early to mid December 2024.

I can’t attend but how can I support Open Source Design?

We opened a specific Open Collective fund to support speakers to attend and speak on open source design topics this year - you can donate directly to that fund to help a speaker get to FOSDEM on our Open Collective here

You can also donate your time or funds to help open source design make the most of FOSDEM. See our section below for how to volunteer and see our Open Collective for how to donate

Where is it?

In person: FOSDEM 2025 will take place at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brusells, Belgium. The ULB website has lots of info about how to get there. The Open Source Design devroom is k3201 with a capcity of 80 people. This map of the campus is helpful.

Remote: All FOSDEM talks are being livestreamed, so you can watch them from anywhere in the world! Come back later for the link to the Open Source Design devroom on the FOSDEM livestream page(#). You can also ask questions during the Q&A sessions from there!

There is also a chat for FOSDEM where you can hang out with other remote attendees and grab a virtual drink, and of course, you can always find us on Mastodon @opensourcedesign@mastodon.social, Twitter @opensrcdesign, and Discourse.

When do I need to be there?

The Open Source Design FOSDEM Devroom will run for the afternoon (from 13.00pm CET) on Sunday 2nd of February. Keep an eye on the schedule to make sure you don’t miss your favourite talk once published!

Besides the actual talks, we are also going to be hanging out in main cafeteria for some chitchat, casual conversations and we’re also waiting to know if we have a stand at FOSDEM 2025.

How do I get involved?

We’re glad you asked! You can help in many ways, including managing the crowd and making sure the room is not exceeding capacity, covering the event on social media, moderating and helping out in the chat rooms, and anything else! Please respond to this forum post to indicate your interest to volunteer. Sadly we cannot fund volunteer travel, visa applications or accomodation.

Any questions?

Check out the FOSDEM FAQ if you have any questions about attending or send a message on the Open Source Design Discourse forum and we will help you out.

Excited to see you there!

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design has a devroom at FOSDEM 2024!

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Saturday & Sunday 3rd-4th February 2024

Time: 13:00 to 17:00 CET

Location: université Libre Brussels, Belgium

The weekend of FOSDEM 2024 has been annouced and we are excited for another in-person Open Source Design devroom! Join us in Brussels for design talks, discussion and fun! Here’s everything you need to know about getting to the Open Source Design devroom at FOSDEM. The Open Source Design community groups welcomes and encourages folks from both design and non-design backgrounds to submit talks related to design to the dev room and attend the talks in the devroom. If you’d like a buddy or someone to chat to before joining us you can check out our discourse forum.

The devroom talks have now been reviewed and our accepted talks are published on the FOSDEM website. The Open Source Design Core team would like to send huge appreciation to all the people that submitted talk proposals, we had amazing proposals this year and we had a really hard time selecting only 8 for the half day we have a devroom for.

Where is it?

In person: FOSDEM 2024 will take place at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brusells, Belgium. The ULB website has lots of info about how to get there. The Open Source Design devroom will take place in room AW1.126 (which is wheelchair accessible). This map of the campus could be helpful.

Remote: All FOSDEM talks are being livestreamed, so you can watch them from anywhere in the world! Find the Open Source Design devroom on the FOSDEM livestream page. You can also ask questions during the Q&A sessions from there!

When do I need to be there?

The Open Source Design FOSDEM Devroom team is waiting to hear from the conference whether we have a room for saturday, sunday or both days. Keep an eye on the schedule to make sure you don’t miss your favourite talk once published!

Besides the actual talks, we are also going to be hanging out in main cafeteria for some chitchat, day and time TBC.

How do I get involved?

We’re glad you asked! You can help in many ways, including managing the crowd and making sure the room is not exceeding capacity, covering the event on social media, moderating and helping out in the chat rooms, and anything else! Put your name and how and when you’d like to volunteer in our volunteers list.

Our call for talks will open soon so keep an eye out!

Any questions?

Check out the FOSDEM FAQ if you have any questions about attending or send a message on the Open Source Design Discourse forum and we will help you out.

Excited to see you there!

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Call for Participation: Open Source Design Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 3rd February 2024

Time: 13:00 CET

Location: Université Libre Brussels, Belgium

FOSDEM is the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting, a free and non-commercial two-day weekend event that offers all open source contributors a place to meet, share ideas, learn and collaborate. Every year, thousands of free and open source software contributors from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels, Belgium. After the roaring success of FOSDEM 2023, we are gearing up for the next edition of FOSDEM, taking place at the Université Libre Brussels on 3rd and 4th February 2024.

Open Source Design @ FOSDEM

Open Source Design has been part of FOSDEM for close to a decade now, giving designers who work with free, libre and open source software a platform to share their ideas. Much like the previous years, Open Source Design will have a devroom at FOSDEM 2024, and this year it will on the second half of the first day of FOSDEM (15:00 to 19:00 of 3rd February 2024, a Saturday). It will be an in-person event, with a livestream online for the folks who are unable to make it in person.

Get involved!

We invite you to give a talk about contributing design to open source projects!

Here are some topics that may inspire your talk:

Your experiences contributing to design in an open source project
How you use FLOSS tools to design
An open source project which is an example of great design
Your design process, research methods, and go-to resources while working with open source projects
Your ideas on fostering diversity and inclusion in design and open source
Anything else related to design and FLOSS!

Some examples of previous talks featured at the Open Source Design devroom at FOSDEM are:

Building a UX research toolkit: How a UX Research Toolkit is being built for the Open Source Ecosystem by Mogashni Naidoo at FOSDEM 2023

Accessibility & Open Source: How open source is key to building a more inclusive world by Mike Gifford at FOSDEM 2023

Calling all UX Designers! Attracting and keeping UX designers on FOSS projects by Scott Jenson at FOSDEM 2022

Documenting a Design System: Lessons learned from open sourcing the Orbit docs by Aaron Collier at FOSDEM 2022

Mentoring designers in open Source Software: What I’ve learned mentoring and supporting designers in OSS by Eriol Fox at FOSDEM 2021

Open Source Design movement in Africa by Peace Ojemeh at FOSDEM 2020

What is the talk format?

This year, all talks at the Open Source Design devroom will be in-person. You will have the stage for 25 minutes in total, so you can have a 20-minute talk with 5 minutes for questions from the audience, or a 25-minute talk with no questions. Talks cannot be longer than 25 mins otherwise you get gently moved off ‘stage’.

How can I submit a talk?

~~Link to submit a talk~~

~~Click “Submit a proposal”. Then all you have to do select “Open Source Design” as the track and fill out the details of your talk according to the instructions.~~

What’s the deadline?

~~We have extended the deadline! Talk proposals must now be submitted before 11 December 2023.~~

~~Accepted talks would be announced latest by 15 December 2023.~~

~~All deadlines are 23:59 UTC. If your talk is accepted, an Open Source Design volunteer will keep in touch with you to help you meet deadlines and with any technical difficulties you may face.~~

Additional information

The Open Source Design devroom at FOSDEM 2024 will be at the Solbosch campus of the Université Libre Brussels, Belgium, in the room AW1.121. Those who are remote will be able to attend virtually.

Be sure to read the FOSDEM Code of Conduct.

If you have any questions, reach out to us on the Open Source Design forum.

We are looking forward to seeing you at FOSDEM 2024!

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Call for Participation: Open Source Design Devroom at FOSDEM 2023

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Date: sunday 5th February 2023

Time: 13:00 to 17:00 CET

Location: université Libre Brussels, Belgium

FOSDEM is the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting, a free and non-commercial two-day weekend event that offers all open source contributors a place to meet, share ideas, learn and collaborate. Every year, thousands of free and open source software contributors from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels, Belgium. After 2 virtual editions, FOSDEM 2023 will be a hybrid event, taking place in Brussels and online on the 4th and 5th of February 2023.

Open Source Design @ FOSDEM

Open Source Design has been a part of FOSDEM for 8 years now, showcasing the work of designers involved with free, libre, and open source projects.

This year our devroom will be a half-day event on Sunday afternoon 5 February 2023 from 13:00 to 17:00 CET. This will include talks about design work in FLOSS. It will happen at the Solbosch campus of the Université Libre Brussels.

All talks will be livestreamed so you can tune in from anywhere in the world!

Get involved!

We invite you to give a talk about contributing design to open source projects!

Here are some topics that may inspire your talk:

Your experiences contributing to design in an open source project
How you use FLOSS tools to design
An open source project which is an example of great design
Your design process, research methods, and go-to resources while working with open source projects
Your ideas on fostering diversity and inclusion in design and open source
Anything else related to design and FLOSS!

What is the talk format?

The majority of talks will be in person, and we expect some to be remote. The length of your talk should be 20 minutes with 5 mins for questions, or 25 minutes without questions.

If you are giving your talk in person, you will deliver the talk live and you need to be physically present at the event in Brussels.
If you are giving your talk remotely, you need to send in a pre-recorded talk and you are required to be online with a stable internet connection when it is being presented and for 5 to 10 minutes after it is done for questions.

How can I submit a talk?

You can submit a talk using the FOSDEM Pentabarf tool;

If you already have an account on Pentabarf, login through that.
If you don’t have an account, create one.
When you’ve logged in, find the “New event” link on the left hand side, and fill out the details of your talk.
Let us know when you are submitting your talk whether you will be at the devroom physically during your talk or if you would be giving a talk remotely. You can do this by including it and the end of the title of your talk. Example:
- “How to contribute to open source design [REMOTE]”
- “Is open source design diverse? [INPERSON]”
Make sure the field “Track” is set to “Open source design devroom” otherwise we won’t receive your talk proposal!
This beginner’s guide to Pentabarf can be helpful if you are unfamiliar with the tool.

What’s the deadline?

Talk proposals must be submitted on or before 12 December 2022.
Accepted talks would be announced on 19 December 2022.
If you are giving a talk remotely, your video recording must be submitted by 20 January 2023.
You must be present at the event or online, depending on your talk format, during your talk on 5 February 2023.

All deadlines times are 23:59 UTC. If your talk is accepted, an Open Source Design volunteer will keep in touch with you to help you meet deadlines and with any technical difficulties you may face.

Additional information

The Open Source Design devroom at FOSDEM 2023 will be at the Solbosch campus of the Université Libre Brussels, Belgium as well as online on 5 February, 2023. The exact room will be announced closer to the date of the event.

Be sure to read the FOSDEM Code of Conduct.

If you have any questions, reach out to us on the Open Source Design forum.

We are looking forward to seeing you at FOSDEM 2023!

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design is at FOSDEM 2023!

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Sunday 5th February 2023

Time: 13:00 to 17:00 CET

Location: université Libre Brussels, Belgium

It’s the weekend of FOSDEM and we are more excited than ever for an in-person Open Source Design devroom after 3 years! Join us in Brussels for an afternoon of design talks, chit chat and drinks! Here’s everything you need to know about getting to the Open Source Design devroom at FOSDEM.

Where is it?

In person: FOSDEM will take place at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brusells, Belgium. The ULB website has lots of info about how to get there. The Open Source Design devroom will take place in room UB4.132 (building U, entrance B, floor 4, room 132). This map of the campus could be helpful.

When do I need to be there?

The talks in the Open Source Design devroom will be presented on the second half of Sunday from 13:00 CET to 17:00 CET. Check the schedule to make sure you don’t miss your favourite talk!

Besides the actual talks, we are also going to be hanging out in main cafeteria for some chitchat on Saturday 04.02 from 10:00 to 12:00 CET like we mentioned on our forum post. We will take over a table and there will be some signs so that you can spot us.

How can I get involved?

We’re glad you asked! You can help in many ways, including managing the crowd and making sure the room is not exceeding capacity, covering the event on social media, moderating and helping out in the chat rooms, and anything else! Put your name and how and when you’d like to volunteer in our volunteers list.

Any questions?

Check out the FOSDEM FAQ if you have any questions about attending or send a message on the Open Source Design Discourse forum and we will help you out.

Excited to see you there!

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Call for Participation: Open Source Design Devroom at FOSDEM 2022

Sat, 04 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Saturday 5th February 2022

Time: 1 day

Location: Online, Remote via FOSDEM website

FOSDEM is the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting, a free and non-commercial two-day weekend event that offers all open source contributors a place to meet, share ideas, learn and collaborate.

Every year, thousands of free and open source software contributors from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels, Belguim. This includes the community of designers contributing to free and open source software.

In 2022 the event will be online as it was in 2021 due to the ongoing pandemic.

Open Source Design at FOSDEM

Open Source Design have for the last 7 years have curated a design track room at FOSDEM. You can watch the talks from Open Source Design dev room 2021 on the FOSDEM website.

The Open Source Design devroom showcases design work happening within free and open source projects, because yes, there is design alive in FOSS. We hope to see you there.

When will the devroom take place?

We have 1 full day of the conference on Saturday the 5th of February, exact times will be released in 2022.

The event will be online and all presentations will be pre-recorded.

What do we mean by design?

We mean “design” in a broad sense including typography, graphic design, interaction design, user experience, human-computer interaction, accessibility, information architecture, content strategy, service design, user researh, design research and your favourite buzzword here. We hope to see you there.

Here’s some ideas of the kinds of topics we’re interested in:

How you have contributed as a designer to OSS and your experiences
What OSS can do to include designers in their OSS
Show design work, methods, examples and guides
Inclusion, diversity, mentoring and governance of OSS from a design perspective
Anything else related to design and OSS!

What is the talk format?

The length of your talk should be 20 minutes with 5 mins of Q&A (leaves us with 5 mins change over for talks)
We are open to talks of up to 40 minutes (35 mins talk and 5 mins of Q&A) for talks with a bigger scope, but we would encourage sticking to 20 minute durations
Be able to pre-record a talk in advance. In order for us to review recordings, videos must be submitted by January 22nd 2022

How will the online event run?

You’re required to be online and be present during your presentation and for 5-10 minutes after to answer any questions the audience watching your talk may have.

Since FOSDEM is held during UTC +1 (CET timezone) day hours you need to be available during the day on the 5th of February for your presentation and the ensuing Q&A.

How do I submit a talk?

To submit your talk you will need an account on the FOSDEM talk submission system.

If you already have a FOSDEM Pentabarf reuse that.
If not, you need to create one and make the submission through the FOSDEM pentabarf system
When prompted to select ‘Track’ be sure to select ‘Open Source Design’ devroom otherwise we will not recieve your submission.
(The Pentabarf beginner’s guide) will help if you’re not familiar with it.

Important Dates and Deadlines

All deadline times are 23:59 UTC.

Submission deadline for talk proposal: December 28th 2021 ~~December 23rd~~

Selected talks announced: December 31st 2021

After all talks are rated, we will inform you about the status of your submission starting Mid-December.

*Video recording submission:*January 22nd 2022

Date Open Source Design devroom talks place: Saturday the 5th February 2022. Exact times will be released in early 2022

Additional support

Make sure to check out the FOSDEM Code of Conduct.
For any questions about this call for participation you can reach out to us in the Open Source Design discourse forum or via email

If you are accepted you will be paired with an Open Source Design volunteer to help prompt you to meet deadlines and also check over your recording. They will also be there on the day to facilitate your 5 mins Q&A.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

FOSS Backstage 2022

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Wed, 17 - 18 March 2022

Time: 1/2 days

Location: Online, Remote and In person in Berlin (limited seats)

The conference on everything related to governance, collaboration, legal and economics within the scope of FOSS. Two days of discussion and learning about non-technical aspects of open source development. Topics include open source project leadership best practices, community management, open source project metrics, open source strategy for enterprise, adopting open source collaboration in corporations, legal matters when dealing with open source and many more.

FOSS Backstage is an open platform that thrives on contributions. The dedicated program committee wants to shape a program that truly is “by the community for the community”. Therefore they are looking forward to input.

They are interested in talks on Open Source project leadership best practices, community management, Open Source project metrics, Open Source strategy for enterprise, adopting Open Source collaboration in corporations (Inner Source), and legal matters when dealing with Open Source.

To give you an idea of the types of talks we are looking for we have created the tracks listed below:

Governance & Community
Sustainability & Funding
Funding Legal & Compliance
Diversity & Inclusion
Growing Open Source

Some question that you might want to discuss in your proposals are:

How can people, who are scattered around the world work together on projects best?
Why is it important to convince people, businesses, cities or even states to use and develop Free and Open Source Software?
How can I sustain my FOSS project?
What Open Source business models are there?
How to best grow and maintain your open source communities and allies?
How to manage your relationship to those stakeholders and what role do OSPOs have in this?
What is the role of design in good open source projects?

Related topics not explicitly listed above are of course welcome as well. They do not, however, accept product presentations or company marketing pitches.

Open Source Design involvement

We at Open Source Design will be helping FOSS Backstage connect with the Open Source design community to include talks and sessions about design.

We mean “design” in a broad sense -

UX Design
UI Design
Community work in OSS with designers
Open Typography
Graphic design
Interaction design
Design research activities
Architechture and 3D design
The use of open source software in the design practice

What and how to submit

~~You can find all the information on how to submit on the FOSS Backstage CfP website.~~ Call for proposals has ended! thank you for submitting :)

~~## Submission format~~

~~5 minute lightining talk~~ ~~30 minute talk (This could be a 20 minute talk with 10 minutes for Q&A)~~ ~~40 minute panel discussion~~ ~~70 minutes workshop~~

Submission deadline

~~The Call for Participation closes on November, 15th (23:59 CET).~~ Call for proposals has ended! thank you for submitting :)

~~All submissions will be reviewed anonymously which means that the program committee is unable to see the submitters personal information such as name, location, background etc.~~

~~Only the talk and the describing abstract is rated in order to reduce unconscious bias.~~

Notifications about submission status

After all talks are rated, we will inform you about the status of your submission starting Mid-November.

Contact and further questions

If you have further questions, see the FOSS Backstage contact details.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Mozfest 2021: Open Source Design helps out Simply Secure with a UX Clinic

Eriol Fox & Core Open Source Design team — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Date: March 2021

Location: online

Mozfest 2021: UX Clinic

For Mozfest 2021, the UX Clinic was organised by Simply Secure staff members and others that are part of the community that Simply Secure maintains for designers working in the intersection of design, human rights, technology and open source. There were a number of ‘rooms’ that the clinic visitors could rotate around after ntroductions were given about our experience and interests as designers in the FLOSS space and the Human Rights technology space. There was enough time to rotate to two different ‘clinic helper’ spaces and have a group discussion in 10-15 minutes or have a 1-2-1 (if there were no other clinic visitors that needed help.

Two conversation examples

The space that I (Eriol Fox) helped with had two primary topics that we covered:

Radical Engineers

The topic around how to ask for design help and how, as a person not deeply knowledgeable about different design practices and skills, to better understand what you want to ask for.

A community member from Radical Engineers came to ask advice on what kind of designer they needed to look for and what different design ‘job titles’ can mean.

They were really struggling with how to ask for what they wanted in a quick and concise way while navigating the ever growing number of design job titles and terms! After discussing what they needed we talked about a particular kind of designer that can do ‘Motion graphics’ which can be part infographics and visulisation skills with the skills of being able to animate and make those graphics and visulisations come to life. We spoke about the differences in designers and graphics creators skill sets and tools they use to create what the Radical Engineers wanted, which included a conversation about the prevelance of proprietory tools like Adobes tools in order to acheive design work like this and how there are still viable open source alternatives which are about SVG and code based animations. I reminded the Radical Engineers of the dominance of proprietary tools in designers lives and how there will be some designers that can create what they need using OSS tools but perhaps they can consider the time scales that they needs this work to include those designers time and support to learn about OSS ways to make motion graphics in the case that the designers that are interested are used to proprietary tools.

Digital Grassroots

The second conversation we had was centred around mentoring and methods for mentoring in OSS that have worked in the past.

A person who works at Digital Grassroots came in to ask about how they can grow and create a community feeling around mentoring and how to encourage participation in broader mentoring conversations.

The advice that I (Eriol) gave around mentoring is how important it was to grow an authentic relationship between the mentor and mentee and to encourage mentee to mentee communication and support networks too. I’ve found when mentoring OSS technologists around design considerations and open source design contributors the best way to support these individuals is to talk about what they are doing with technology, design and OSS but also talk about the other things they are passionate about and thinking about as the build their tech and contribute to OSS. Our lives as people are not as removed from the work (both paid and OSS volunteer) as we think or hope and being abe to acknowledge this as a mentor and making it clear the mentee knows you value their health and growth makes for a relationship based on care and empathy. This in turn, helps the mentees to extend the same empathy and compassion to the people that use their technology tools and OSS.

The other helpers in the Mozfest 2021 UX Clinic had conversations around accesibility, usability and inclusion across various OSS technologies and human rights projects as well as specifically giving UX feedback for a wildlife preservation photography website. Going over flows for uploading photos and providing geographical information and metadata, as well as editing the photos.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

FOSS Backstage 2021: Open Source Design track support and UX Clinic wrap up

Eriol Fox & Core Open Source design team — Mon, 05 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Date: June 2021

Location: online

FOSS Backstage 2021

FOSS Backstage approached the Open Source Design community in late 2020 to help out with the design track curation of thier event. They saw design as an increasingly important aspect of open source and wanted to first promote and gather more design talks and sessions as well as ensure the design sessions that were selected were well thought out and had feedback from designers within the open source world as feedback.

As Open Source Design, we helped go through the talk submissions for the design track of FOSS backstage. We looked at talk pitches anononymusly to reduce bias and advised the conference organisers whether talks looked ready to the conference or if they needed further context or information based off of the attending open source design community members experience.

Then then planned and agreed to run a ‘UX clinic’ for the attendees of FOSS Backstage 2021. Open Source Design had previously run a UX clinc at FOSS Backstage in 2020 (just before travel was restricted for Covid-19) and at other events including FOSDEM and Mozfest.

The format of a UX clinic is flexible depending on who attends and asks for clinic help and who is there to help but the basic set up is:

Agree with the conference or event about how long a UX clinic can be run. UX Clinics don’t have to be restricted to any time frame and is largely dictated by what the conference can support and what the design volunteer ciic helpers can offer time wise. For FOSS Backstage 2021 we agreed to have a 2- 3 hour long UX Clinic session that was open alongside other conference talks and had a casual, drop in atmosphere.

Ahead of the event, we reached out to our community of open source designers and ask for volunteer clinic helpers. These are the people that will be offering advice and suport to clinic vistors. These volunteers let us know their availability across the time the conference were hosting us and added their ‘availability’ to a collaborative shared spreadsheet so the person managing the UX Clinic could see who was going to arrive at what point and what kinds of skills and advice they are happy to offer.

We had a dedicated open ‘room’ on the online event platform that FOSS Backstage 2021 had with the ability for private ‘breakout rooms’ if needed. It’s important to establish a space (in-person or online) where people who want to visit the UX clinic can approach the clinic helpers. People approached the ‘reception’ virtual room or table where they could ask questions about what kind of help is on offer and who is helping out. The private online rooms or in-person’ side areas’ away from the main ‘reception’ or ‘sign up space’ help to value confidentiality and privacy of the people that are requesting help from the UX clinic.

And once open, with your design clinic helpers the UX clinic is opena nd ready to help folks! We usually stick to a 10 minute clinic help consultation with the option to extend if we have anough clinic helpers and time as well as not limiting the UX clinic to topics around UX! (User Experience).

Over the years we’ve helped with UX, but also with how to talk to other OSS contributors and maintainers about designers beginning to contribute, about usability, user testing, workshop planning, including your users in the designing of your OSS software and all things visual design like icons, logos, identity and brand and much more!

At FOSS backstage we had a number of small conversations about desinging in the FLOSS space and how designers navigate the complexities of FLOSS and design and then we focussed in as a group to help an attendee who was working on an OSS tool for developers that allowed them to manage the visual code editor space in a number of interesting and flexible ways. We talked about how this kind of interface (not unlike the terminal or other code editors) could be made more accessible using usability and accessibility standards that many designers use in their day to day work or contributions. These included pieces of advice like not relying on a particular colour for a ‘user actioned’ interface change due to different kinds of colour blindness where some people cannot see certain colours distinct from others. We talked about the important of multiple visual indicators that an interface has changed, for example, using symbols or words as well as colours. We then spoke about how to perform usertesting and usability tests and our experiences and best practice as designers doing many different kinds of user tests across lots of different tools and software. This advice included tips like, asking non-leading questions and questions that elicit more than a ye or no response, for example: “Can you tell me about the most recent time that [software or tool] did something you thought was great and really helped you? What happened just before and just after?” We wrapped up our conversation with dicussion on how documentation can be improved by designers being invovled, especially designer with experience and interest in ‘Content Design’ ‘User Experience’ (UX) ‘Information Architechure or Design’(IA) and ‘Educational or Learning Design’. we spoke about how not just this tool had developers asking the same questions about how to use a tool over and over, where they could find the answer in the documentation and how frustrating it is an OSS maintainer to repeat where new controbutors can find answers. We spoke about how this isn’t the fault of the contributors or of the OSS maintainer, but likely about how humans generally navigate complex information (documentation) and how that can be better designed and user tested to be improved over time.

The Open Source Design community enjoyed talking with the folks at FOSS Backstage and hosting UX clinics so if you’dlike support with your OSS conference for a design track or us hosting a UX clinic reach out on: core@opensourcedesign.net

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

FOSDEM 2021: Open Source Design Devroom wrap up

Eriol Fox — Wed, 05 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 6–7 February 2021

Location: online

FOSDEM 2021, like many conferences across the span of 2020 and beyond was very different to previous years and no less for the volunteer team at Open Source Design (OSD). The volunteers at OSD however, are used to communicating asyncronously as we’re reasonably well spread out across the globe.

As open source design has done for the last 5 years, we applied for a devroom at FOSDEM 2021 and succeded! t was then that we reached out to our community and wider for talk submissions ahead of FOSDEM’s plans around the services they would use for both talk submissions and the platforms to hold the conference. We received 17 talk proposals and were able to accept all of them alongside our two usual FOSDEM open source design sessions.

At our most busy time we had over 293 people watching the Open Source Design Devroom which is more than we’d have ever been able to fit in the smaller rooms at the university campus in Brussels!

We had talks from established designers in the FLOSS space as well as designers that are newer to FLOSS which offered a fantastic broad approach to the topics relevant to design in FLOSS.

The talks are listed below, each with a link to the speakers talk outline and profile on FOSDEM as well as their talk video, also hosted on the FOSDEM website.

A brief introduction to Open Source Design by Bernard Tyers . See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

Communicating CryptPad by David Benque. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

Design Bitcoin for Everyone: How we practice and spread open design to make Bitcoin more intuitive and accessible by Christoph Ono. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

Redesign of an established Open Source CMS: Drupal Admin UI: Past, Present and possible Future by Sascha Eggenberger. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

Why are we scared of user research? by Belen Barros Pena. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

UX contributions to pip, Python’s package installer: A conversation about UX contributions with the pip team by Bernard Tyers. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

Gain a Superpower in OSS as a Designer Through Code by Kartik Choudhary. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

Open design and how everyone can be a designer: Changing the way we design together by Memo Esparza. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

Mentoring designers in open Source Software: What I’ve learned mentoring and supporting designers in OSS. by Eriol Fox. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

Ways to Contribute to OS Projects Without Writing Line(s) of Code by Sixtus Chizaram Isaac. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

Community-accessible EEG monitoring of the user’s mental state in the UX/UI research by Dmitriy Kostiuk. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

Latest tech, great! Accessibility, not so much. by Oana Mangiurea. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

OSH Communication Kit:Conversation starters for the Deaf and the Hearing by Daniel Wessolek. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

Own Your Healthcare Experience: An Open Source Path by Juhan Sonin. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

Penpot, design freedom for teams: One FOSDEM and one pandemic after we’re excited to announce that Penpot Alpha release will be launched February 2nd! by Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

The Open Source Designer’s ToolBox: Recommended Techniques and Tools for Open Source Designers by Abigail Makolo. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

The user in the cultures of UX design and open source by Jan Dittrich. See the twitter here for a round up of this talk here

You can also take a look at our twitter from FOSDEM 2021 to see live tweets summarising the talks and spotlighting the key content discussed: http://bit.ly/OSD-FOSDEM2021

Our two regular Open Source Design community delivered sesisons are first, an introduction to Open Source Design’s mission and vision and the final session which is an open discussion to ‘pitch your project’ where FLOSS projects can spend some time talking to the devroom attendees about their FLOSS project and asking for design support. This is also an oportunity for designers interested in helping FLOSS projects to talk about what they’d like to offer. See the twitter thread here

Why pitch your project is important to the Open Source Design Dev room As Open Source Design we’ve discovered over the years, that FLOSS projects are interested in design and the wide spectrum of support design functions can offer a FLOSS project but they often get stuck with what exactly to ask for and what is reasonable and appropriate! by offering a chance for FLOSS projects and designers to ‘pitch’ both sides of the partnership gets a chance to communicate what they need, want and can do for each other.

And finally, here’s a screenshot of the Open Source Design team and attendees at the end of FOSDEM 2021! Add the lovely screenshot here.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

FOSS Backstage 2021

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Wed, 10 - 11 Feb 2021

Time: 1/2 days

Location: Online, Remote

FOSS Backstage 2021: Call for Participation from designers

What is FOSS Backstage?

They are interested in talks on:

design in Open Source
Open Source project leadership best practices
community management
Open Source project metrics
Open Source strategy for enterprise
adopting Open Source collaboration in corporations
legal matters when dealing with Open Source

Open Source Design involvement

We at Open Source Design will be helping FOSS Backstage connect with the Open Source design community to include talks and sessions about design.

We mean “design” in a broad sense -

term typography
graphic design
interaction design
user experience
design research activities
the use of open source software in the design practice

What and how to submit

You can find all the information on how to submit on the FOSS Backstage CfP website.

Submission format

30 minute talk (This could be a 20 minute talk with 10 minutes for Q&A)

Submission deadline

The Call for Participation closes on October, 25th (23:59 CET).

All submissions will be reviewed blindly which means that the program committee is unable to see the submitter.

Only the talk and the describing abstract is rated in order to reduce unconscious bias.

Notifications about submission status

After all talks are rated, we will inform you about the status of your submission starting Mid-November.

Contact and further questions

If you have further questions, see the FOSS Backstage contact details.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Call for Participation: Open Source Design Devroom at FOSDEM 2021

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Sat & Sun, 6 & 7 Feb 2021

Time: Exact times yet to be defined

Location: Fully online

After 6 successful years we will host another design devroom at FOSDEM 2021 (virtually)!

The Open Source Design devroom will take place online over the weekend of 6th and 7th February 2021.

The exact times will be confirmed in the coming months. Due to the global health situation, FOSDEM will take place completely online.

There will be talks about design work on free, libre and open source projects.

We invite you to send in your submissions about design work on free, libre and open source projects.

We mean ‘design’ in the broadest sense: user research, interface and interaction design, information architecture, visual design, typography, illustration, iconography, spatial, accessibility (and anything you can think of) – all in the context of open source projects, which we believe introduces unique challenges.

Designers and developers working with designers (or on a design-minded project) are welcome to submit proposals.

Possible topics include:

FOSS design tools
Unique challenges that open source brings
Design techniques and deliverables
Design/engineering collaboration approaches
User engagement and design research activities
Project case studies

If you’re interested in seeing all previous talks, have a look at the schedule, and videos for 2019 and 2018,

Talk submission details

Due to FOSDEM 2021 being fully online there are some important changes -

Talks must be pre-recorded in advance. The talk will then be streamed during the event.
Speakers are responsible for recording their talks
After the talk stream, there will be a live Question & Answer session
People watching the talk stream will be to chat online, and submit questions
The reference time will be Brussels local lime (Central European Time)

For accepted talks

For talks which are accepted:

All speakers will be assigned a devroom contact to support them and answer questions before the event
All speakers will need to record their talk and upload it to FOSDEM’s website
The deadline for uploading talk videos is expected to be in the first two weeks of January
The talk videos will be reviewed to ensure they have the required quality
During the stream of the talk, the speaker must be available online for the Q/A session.
Final timeslots will be co-ordinated with speakers after all talks have been finalised

Recording and licensing of talks

By submitting a proposal you consent to be recorded, and agree to license the content of your talk under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license.

What and how to submit

Submission format

20-minute presentations

Submission deadline

23rd December 2020

Notification about accepted talks

We expect to notify people if their talk has been accepted or not by approximately 31st of December.

How to submit

All submissions are made in the Pentabarf event planning tool at https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM21

When submitting your talk in Pentabarf, when asked for the ‘Track’, you must select the ‘Open source design devroom’.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year.

Who to contact for help

If you have any issues with Pentabarf, do not despair contact - bernard + fosdem at ei8fdb dot org or vic3brown at gmail dot com

Who co-ordinates Open Source Design devroom

The Open Source Design Devroom is co-ordinated by the Open Source Design community.

Check out the links below to learn more about us:

Examples of past talks:

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Call for Participation: Open Source Design Devroom at FOSDEM 2020

Sun, 02 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2019

Time: full days

Location: Room not yet confirmed, Solbosch campus - Université Libre Brussels, Brussels, Belgium

After 5 successful years we will host another design devroom at FOSDEM 2020!

The Open Source Design devroom will take place on Sunday, February 2nd, in the Solbosch campus of the Université Libre Brussels. The exact room will be confirmed in the coming months.

This will be a full day of talks about design work on free, libre and open source projects.

We invite you to send in your submissions about design work on free, libre and open source projects.

Designers and developers working with designers (or on a design-minded project) are welcome to submit proposals.

Possible topics include:

FOSS design tools
Unique challenges that open source brings
Design techniques and deliverables
Design/engineering collaboration approaches
User engagement and design research activities
Project case studies

If you’re interested in seeing all previous talks, have a look at the schedule, and videos for 2019 and 2018,

Recording and licensing of talks

The talks in the Open Source Design devroom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too.

By submitting a proposal you consent to be recorded and agree to license the content of your talk under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license.

What and how to submit

Submission format

20-minute presentations

Submission deadline

1st December 2019

How to submit

All submissions are made in the Pentabarf event planning tool at https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM20/

When submitting your talk in Pentabarf, when asked for the ‘Track’, you must select the ‘Open source design devroom’.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year.

If you have any issues with Pentabarf, do not despair contact - amit dot lzkpa at gmail dot com

Who co-ordinates Open Source Design devroom

The Open Source Design Devroom is co-ordinated by the Open Source Design community.

Check out the links below to learn more about us:

Examples of past talks:

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design speak at FOSDEM 2020

amitlzkpa — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 1–2 February 2020

Location: Brussels, Belgium

During the first weekend of February 2020 Open Source Design (OSD) hosted the 6th edition of our devroom at FOSDEM.

We at Open Source Design have been fortunate to coordinate with them for 6 consecutive years!! 🎉🎉
Like all years we had a great variety of speakers discussing a wide range of topics (from design principles to self-publishing to soft-launches to discussions on using design for the common good).
You can find a full-list below and make sure to check out the links to learn more about the talks and speakers.

Open Source design - Africa
Peace Ojemeh talks about the Open Source Community Africa (O.S.C.A) movement promoting the open source culture within and across Africa. It aims to bridge the diversity gap of the open source culture through advocacy because of potential and great energy coming from the continent.
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/open_source_design_africa/

What are we talking about when we say “open design”?
Manufactura Independente presents an exercise in labeling, presenting terms and trying to define their scope in the hopes of improving the ways in which open design can be explained to others.
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/what_are_we_talking_about_when_we_say_open_design/

Some Excerpts from the Theory of Design in Architecture
Amit Nambiar talk discusses some theories from architectural discourse which attempt to solve problems requiring critical and creative thinking. The talk sheds light on some interesting examples of design challenges architects and planners have dealt with.
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/some_excerpts_from_theory_of_design_in_architecture/

UI/UX Tips & Tricks for developers
Ecaterina Moraru shows us some general UI/UX tips & tricks that will help you design better. Everyone should know the basic principles and patterns of design, and once you understand them you will naturally integrate them in your work.
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/ui_ux_trips_and_tricks_for_developers/

Accessibility in MuseScore
Peter Jonas and Marc Sabatella from MuseScore share the developing team’s experience in making a popular open source program accessible to keyboard and screen reader control. MuseScore is the world’s most popular sheet music program used by millions of musicians around the world, including many who are blind, partially sighted, or who struggle to use a traditional mouse-based interface.
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/accessibility_in_musescore/

Gitflow Design
Diogo Sergio shares with us Gitflow - a git workflow for designers and design work meant to open up the benefits of git for designers. With this approach designers get to take advantage of a git features such as controlled access, review process, feedback system, version control files, preview changes in context with side-by-side diffs, detailed history of changes and more.
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/git_workflow_for_design_in_os_projects/

UXBOX, the time for an open source online prototyping platform has arrived Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz shows us UXBOX - an open source prototyping online platform based on SVG. The team shares the vision and the 2020 product roadmap, explaining the resources that are being committed. The talk goes over the history, has a running demo and invites participants for feedback.
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/uxbox_open_source_online_prototyping_platform/

Using biometric gadgets for express-tests in the UX/UI research
Dmitriy Kostiuk shares with us his work on estimating the user’s physical and mental state with a set of special measuring devices which can be helpful in detecting bottlenecks of the human-computer interaction. Contemporary consumer-grade gadgets targeted at fitness and entertainment are much more affordable and precise enough to be used in the UX/UI comparison. The talk highlights which devices are the most suitable ones for the research purposes in the open-source world (the ones having open-source and GNU/Linux frameworks to access biometric data).
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/using_biometric_gadgets_for_express_tests_in_ux_ui_research/

Beyond the Pile of Knobs: Usability and Design for Privacy, Security, Safety & Consent
Georgia Bullen from Simply Secure shares examples of how we can design, centering the needs of the most vulnerable. The talk presents the problems, e.g. why the UX patterns that make consenting or refusing consent so difficult in practice and why open source security tools are often associated with bulky user interfaces and inaccessible jargon, and share findings from years of working with projects in the Internet Freedom, Digital Rights, Media Justice, Translation, Training, Civic Tech and Development communities.
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/beyond_the_pile_of_knobs/

Jumpstarting your business with Odoo
Jeroen Baten describes the process of discovering the wonders of Odoo when he got the project to write a book about it. His writing tools are Vim, Git, Asciidoctor-pdf and Inkscape. It describes both the technical as the organisational challenges during the writing process.
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/over_asciidoctor_and_generating_publishing_a_book/

File sharing & storage for human rights organizations
Allon Bar and Abigail Garner from Least Authority presents a design research project that looks at open source file storage and sharing solutions for human rights organizations. They present the project, the first phase of our research process, and outlook on next steps that involve adapting open source tools.
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/file_sharing_and_storage_for_human_rights_organizations/

Design contributions to OSS: Learnings from the Open Design project at Ushahidi
Hear Eriol Fox about how the team at Ushahidi tackle systemic problems with how to ‘open source’ a design effort and bring the community along with the ‘on-staff’. Their team has been piloting a series of design events on OSS crisis communication tool TenFour with partners Designit and Adobe. In this session, the speaker briefly covers the history of the project and the main problems attempted to solve. They present the learning and adaptions to their workshop framework and methodology that aims to engage design teams and individuals that are not yet ‘on-board’ with OSS as an ethos or movement.
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/design_contributions_to_oss/

Designing to change it all
Winfried Tilanus showcases the SamenBeter project as example of how design is about much more then user interfaces. It is about designing processes, user interactions and designing the adaptation of the product itself. Check out how they started with designing the change they wanted before starting to think about a product and how it looks in practice.
https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/designing_to_change_it_all/

The day ended with our tradition of opening up the stage for anyone who wants to talk about their project in short 5 minute pitches.

The talk selections happened through public voting and we were enthused to see the crowd flowing through our devroom. You can catch-up on the presentations if you missed them and the conversations are still alive on our forum.

Thanks to all speakers and organizers for making this event happen and we hope to be back next year with the same amount of enthusiasm.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Design @ Open UP global summit: Taipei, Nov 30th - Dec 7th

Sat, 30 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Sunday, 1st Dec 2019 & Saturday, 7th Dec 2019

Time: two half days

Location: Taipei, Taiwan

A workshop organised by the team from Open Design + Ushahidi hosted and supported by Open UP global summit. It will take place in Taipei, Taiwan.

The ‘Open Design’ workshop which is testing a methodology, workshop structure, and repo/file set-up in order to see if we can boost design contributions to a specific open-source product. For the first two workshops, we’re using Ushahidi’s TenFour tool which is a crisis communication tool.

We’ll be looking at how designers can improve certain issues within the TenFour repo with the context being around the Tropical Cyclones and Typoons.

If any OSD folks are around the area please let me know if you’d like to be part of the team in delivering the workshop and/or a participant.

Please see our [event listing on the Open Design website](https://opendesign.ushahidi.com/taipei-openup-global-summit-201

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Call for Participation: Open Source Design Devroom at FOSDEM 2019

Sat, 02 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2019

Time: full days

Location: Room not yet confirmed, Solbosch campus - Université Libre Brussels, Brussels, Belgium

After successful runs in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, there will be a design devroom at FOSDEM 2019!

The Open Source Design devroom will take place on Saturday, February 2nd, in the Solbosch campus of the Université Libre Brussels. The exact room will be confirmed in the coming months.

This will be a full day of talks about design work on free, libre and open source projects.

We invite you to send in your submissions about design work on free, libre and open source projects.

We mean ‘design’ in the broadest sense: user research, interface and interaction design, information architecture, visual design, typography, illustration, iconography, accessibility … – all in the context of open source projects, which we believe introduces unique challenges.

Designers and developers working with designers (or on a design-minded project) are welcome to submit proposals.

Possible topics include:

FOSS design tools
Unique challenges that open source brings
Design techniques and deliverables
Design/engineering collaboration approaches
User engagement and design research activities
Project case studies

In the past we’ve had talks about getting designers involved in open source, accessibility in open source, application design and development, beyond logos, architectural font digitisation and design and lots more.

If you’re interested in seeing all previous talks, have a look at the schedule, and videos for 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015.

Recording and licensing of talks

The talks in the Open Source Design devroom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too.

By submitting a proposal you consent to be recorded and agree to license the content of your talk under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license.

What and how to submit

Submission format

20-minute presentations

Submission deadline

Extended to 8th December 2018 ~~1st December 2018~~

How to submit

All submissions are made in the Pentabarf event planning tool at https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM19/

When submitting your talk in Pentabarf, when asked for the ‘Track’, you must select the ‘Open source design devroom’.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, please reuse it: create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year.

If you have any issues with Pentabarf, do not despair contact - bernard+fosdem at ei8fdb dot org

Who co-ordinates Open Source Design devroom

The Open Source Design Devroom is co-ordinated by the Open Source Design community.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design track at FOSDEM 2019

Sat, 02 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2019

Time: full days

Location: Solbosch campus - Université Libre Brussels, Brussels, Belgium

FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial event organised by the community for the community. The goal is to provide free and open source software developers and communities a place to meet, share ideas and collaborate.

After 4 successful hosting of devrooms at FOSDEM 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, we would like to repeat the experience this year again.

Since the beginning of Open Source Design community we promoted several initiatives, like the “Open Source Design Jobs Board” where FOSS projects looking for design contributors can connect with available designers.

The goal of this devroom is to showcase design work done within free and open source projects, and strengthen the connections between designers involved in FOSS.

We mean “design” in a broad sense, and we include within that term typography, graphic design, interaction design, user experience and design research activities.

Participation and attendance is totally free, though the organisers gratefully accept donations and sponsorship.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design Summit 2018

AnXh3L0 — Tue, 25 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 2–4 November 2018

Location: Tirana, Albania

During the first weekend of November we had the annual Open Source Design Summit in the capital of Albania, Tirana.

Open Source Design (short OSD) is a community of designers and developers pushing more open design processes and improving the user experience and interface design of open source software. The community writes articles, runs a job board, puts on events, provides resources, and presents talks targeted at developers and designers interested in working and designing in Open Source.

Open Source Design Summit itself is an annual event where designers, developers and more join to discuss and work towards internal and external Open Source Design related topics. This includes how to improve our involvement in various projects, improve feedback processes, and work in the open

Together with the Open Source Design community, Ura Design initiated the discussion on the Open Source Design organization repo on GitHub regarding the location of the upcoming Summit and proposed Tirana. While the last edition was held in Berlin, we were convinced it would be a healthy step to have a moving Summit which would not necessarily happen in the usual suspect cities of Europe. Tirana was a good compromise to try this out. In the following months, we coordinated our efforts through monthly calls and Discourse.

Overview

November 2nd (Reception)

We started on the Friday afternoon with a reception gathering at Ofiçina, the venue where many other past events have been organized by local communities, including LibreOffice Conference. The OSD Summit is not close to any big conference (yet at least) but more of a small unconference.

There were participants from countries as far as New Zealand, Czech Republic, Germany, Kosovo.

During the rather informal gathering we spontaneously put up a circle of chairs in the area outside. Did we mention that the weather was fantastic? We even ended up doing many sessions out in the open.

After a round of introductions, we began brainstorming the schedule for the next 2 days, something which has worked well for us in the past edition as well.

November 3rd (First Meeting Day)

We officially started the Summit by welcoming everyone and giving an intro to Open Source Design for newcomers that decided to join us in the Summit. Unlike the past Summit, we had a good mix of core contributors and newcomers, so it only made sense to adapt, following up with a short talk by David and Tereza from Red Hat about Design Systems, and specifically about PatternFly.

Next up we had a very interesting and involving workshop about Cut, Copy & Paste from Sam. The workshop was there to teach beginners about the concept of git as a version control system (as designers usually have to work with git too, which is a showstopper for many at first).

After the workshop, there was lunch at 1 PM and the sessions restarted at 2 PM. In the next sessions, we talked about finalizing our Manifesto, a topic we had been discussing for a long time at our Discourse forum and we think we finally have a ready-to-go version that will be published soon on the website.

The following topic was about our upcoming events and where should Open Source Design focus on more, a nice discussion that happened outside, in the warm weather (really, Albania is warm even in November).

The next topic was a sharing round where we shared our knowledge and skills. Renata from the Ura Design team shared her Research workflow and showcased Usability Studies they accomplished before, such as Thunderbird and I2P. Later, Sam shared some info about the issue of Diffing SVG-s and how difficult it is to process it correctly and with consistent results, because each software tries to do it in their own way.

November 4th (Last Meeting Day)

The last day started a bit later, which is expected of a Sunday morning

We firstly discussed about the Summit itself and how we could build upon community building intiatives (via local meetups for example). Afterwards we split into two groups, where one worked on the new draft of the Manifesto while the other one discussed about the State of Open Source Design tools.

We continued talking about ways to build up a budget that Open Source Design can use to extend its activity, changes we would be doing in the Open Source Design website, such as a new theme, the structure of the organisation, the platforms we would use, the politics we would follow, Adbusting, project outreach and how we could onboard new designers into the project.

Of course we didn’t forget to take a group photo from the Summit!

Thanks to the support from Stickermule, Mozilla, phpList, Open Tech Fund, Red Hat, Nextcloud & the local Ura Design we were able to bring the Summit to Tirana.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design Summit 2018: Tirana, Nov 02-04

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2018 - Sun, 04 Nov 2018

Time: full days

Location: Tirana, Albania

Archived:
The Open Source Design Summit is no longer active.
This event page is preserved for historical reference.

We’re organizing a summit for all designers and developers interested in cheerleading great design in open source. It will take place in Tirana, Albania.

Please see our Summit page for more information and Register to express interest in attending!

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design NYC meetup recap - July 2018

Dinamichl, Eliheuer — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 12 July 2018

Location: New York, USA

The Big Idea

Open source communities push collaboration, sharing and transparency throughout various industries. While design and creativity have never been more important, we often wonder, “where can designers who focus on open source projects share what they do, push their designs further and encourage other designers to join the community?” Come to our meetup to learn more. This month’s nyc meetup covered the history and future of free software font editors.

The history and future of free software font editors

Eli is a libre graphics focused designer and software developer who has worked with clients such as Jacobin Magazine, EA Games, and Ruffeo Hearts Lil’ Snotty. His blog and links to social media profiles can be found at: Eli.blog

Eli Heuer about to dive into the world of font editors.

A little bit about Eli

Eli became interested in Fonts due to a teaching opportunity in Bushwick NY in 2013. Working with local kids that did not have access to expensive computers helped spark his determination to teach them about the world of free software. Among other projects he worked with local artists that had either little or no budget for their art shows and provided them with design work or tool kits to help them create events posters and collateral.

Example of some of his past work

Eli’s love of fonts and type only grew as began to dig deeper into the world of software development. Here is his presentation on the history and future of free software font editors:

Highlights from the presentation include:

History of free software font - starts with MetaFont and LaTEX by Donald Knuth “A mathematical formula should never be “owned” by anybody! Mathematics belong to God” (that should stir up many discussions off screen)

“Computers back in the day weren’t able to use fonts - they were just type in a terminal”.

After the 80s - bitmap fonts came into the digital scene. There is a podcast interview with Zusanna Lithgow of EMIGRE Magazine (1984-1994) where she talks about how she pioneered the whole concept of selling digital fonts. She Started by sending fonts typeset on paper and mailed to people that requested/paid for them. Eventually they were sold on on floppy disks.

The Magazine That Ignores Boundaries (1984)

Free Software Movement - Richard Stallman launched the Free software movement in 1983 while working at MIT.

Eli brought up an interesting view/perspective on free software vs proprietary. It was quoted by Rich hickey - software architecture idea. If you use proprietary font editor, they start off easy to use but eventually become quite restricting and complicated. Whenever you make it proprietary you lose the simplicity. This is the reverse with free software font editors: they have a learning curve but always strive to keep things simple to use/export.

His interest in Software architecture brought him to TruFont which unfortunately is currently in a stalled state of development.

He covered FontForge which he ported over onto the PocketChip he brought with him to the presentation.

Eli’s PocketChip that runs Linux and FontForge and let’s you use a pen!

Dave Crossland playing with the PocketChip

The free software font editing world is quite vast and still growing. As Eli pointed out, if you love type, and want to design your own; it’s impossible to avoid the free software side of it’s history. Proprietary software is expensive and restricting. There are so many communities like FontForge and TruFont that could benefit from more participation and support.

Slides were created in drawbot

Next meetup

Please follow us on Mastodon for our next meetup announcement. Be seeing you!

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design NYC: July 12 2018

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Thu, 12 July 2018

Time: 6:00pm - 8.00pm (EDT)

Location: New York

Please join us on Thursday evening for a presentation and Q&A with Eli Heuer on the history and future of free software font editors. This will cover TruFont, FontForge, MetaFont and other examples/tools used in the free software community. Eli is a libre graphics focused designer and software developer who has worked with clients such as Jacobin Magazine, EA Games, and Ruffeo Hearts Lil’ Snotty. His blog and links to social media profiles can be found at: https://elih.blog

The meetup will take place in ThoughtWorks offices, 99 Madison Avenue, 15th floor on Thursday 12th of July, from 6.00pm to 8.00pm.

Please RSVP by registering on this event page.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design NYC: May 24 2018

Thu, 24 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Thu, 24 May 2018

Time: 6:00pm - 8.00pm (EDT)

Location: New York

Please join us on Thursday evening for a presentation and Q&A on Cita with Juliana Castro.

Juliana Castro is a graphic designer, art director, and open access enthusiast specializing in editorial and interaction design. Juliana has experience working in museums, educational institutions, and advertising agencies. She’s the founder of Cita, a feminist digital library and press publishing open-licensed books written by women. Juliana received a Fulbright Scholarship in 2016 and earned her M.F.A. at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. During the summer of 2018, she’ll join the Berkman Klein Center for the Internet at Harvard University as the Harvard Open Access Project Intern. Juliana cares about the Internet, diversity, accessibility, and GIFs.

The meetup will take place in ThoughtWorks offices, 99 Madison Avenue, 15th fl on Thursday 24th of May, from 6.00pm to 8.00pm.

We’d appreciate if you would announce yourself beforehand by registering on this event page.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Libre Graphics Meeting 2018

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Thu, 26 April 2018 – Mon, 30 April 2018

Time: full days

Location: C / Pasaje Mallol 22, 41003, Seville, Spain

The Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is an annual meeting of free and open source graphics software users and developers.

Held yearly since 2006, the LGM aims to attract developers, artists and professionals who use and improve free and open source software graphics applications. The LGM aims to bring these people together in the cause of creating high quality free graphics applications.

LGM promotes discussions amongst software developers, users, and the large intersection of those two categories. Unlike many events devoted to Free/Libre Open Source Software, LGM has always had a strong artistic focus, with designers and artists showcasing their work alongside the work of software developers.

Map: Tramallol

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Libre Graphics Track at Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) 2018

Fri, 09 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2018

Time: full day

Location: Pasadena Convention Center, Pasadena, CA USA

SCaLE 16X – the 16th annual Southern California Linux Expo – will take place on March. 8-11, 2018, at the Pasadena Convention Center. SCaLE 16X expects to host 150 exhibitors this year, along with nearly 130 sessions, tutorials and special events. SCaLE is the largest community-run open-source and free software conference in North America. It is held annually in the greater Los Angeles area.

This year the organizers have agreed to hosting a Libre Graphics track at the expo. The team is reaching out to all in the graphic and design community to come out and spend a day together helping to spread awareness of libre graphics tools, processes, and community.

Participation and attendance is totally free, though the organisers gratefully accept donations and sponsorship.

Map: Pasadena Convention Center

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design NYC: Feb 26 2018

Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2018

Time: 6:00pm - 8.00pm (EDT)

Location: New York

Our next open source design meet-up will present our group’s mission and overseas members, along with a recap of the FOSDEM conference. We will also do a quick introduction on the Riot messaging app (a Slack open source competitor) and show you how to communicate on this new platform.

The meetup took place at ThoughtWorks offices, 99 Madison Avenue on Monday 26th of February, from 6.00pm to 8.00pm.

Registration via Eventbrite is now closed.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Call for Participation: Open Source Design Devroom at FOSDEM 2018

Sun, 04 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2018

Time: pending

Location: K.4.201, Université Libre Brussels (Solbosch campus), Belgium

FOSDEM is the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting, a free and non-commercial two-day weekend event that offers open source contributors a place to meet, share ideas and collaborate.

After successful runs in 2015, 2016 and 2017, there will be again a design devroom at FOSDEM 2018: a full day of talks about design work on free, libre and open source projects. The Open Source Design devroom will take place on Sunday, February 4th.

We invite you to send in your submissions about design work on free, libre and open source projects.

Possible topics include:

FOSS design tools
Design techniques and deliverables
Design - engineering collaboration approaches
User engagement and design research activities
Project case studies

What and how to submit

Recording and licensing:

The talks in the Open Source Design devroom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too. By submitting a proposal you consent to be recorded and agree to license the content of your talk under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license.

Format:

20-minute presentations

Submission deadline:

1st December 2017

How to submit

All submissions are made in the Pentabarf event planning tool at

https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM18/

When submitting your talk in Pentabarf, make sure to select the ‘Open source design devroom’ as the ‘Track’.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, please reuse it: create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, do not despair: contact victoria dot bondarchuk at gmail dot com

Who coordinates Open Source Design devroom

The Open Source Design Devroom is coordinated by the Open Source Design community.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Community space at CSSconf EU 2018

Sun, 04 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Fri, 5 May 2017

Time: 8:30-19:00

Location: Arena Berlin, Eichenstraße 4, Berlin

Thanks to an invitation by the awesome organizers, we were part of the community space at CSSconf EU! :)

We had a short session for introducing Open Source Design, and also to showcase some well-designed open source projects to get involved with.

There’s a tweet about it too. :)

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design track at FOSDEM 2018

Sun, 04 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2018

Time: full days

Location: K.4.201, ULB Campus Solbosch, Brussels, Belgium

After three successful hosting of devrooms at FOSDEM 2015, 2016 and 2017, we would like to repeat the experience this year again. Since the beginning of Open Source Design community (https://opensourcedesign.net/) we promoted several initiatives, like having a “jobs board” where FOSS projects looking for design contributors can connect with available designers. The goal of this devroom is to showcase design work done within free and open source projects, and strengthen the connections between designers involved in FOSS. We mean “design” in a broad sense, and we include within that term typography, graphic design, interaction design, user experience and design research activities.

Participation and attendance is totally free, though the organisers gratefully accept donations and sponsorship.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design NYC: Jan 18 2018

Thu, 18 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Thurs, 18 Jan 2018

Time: 6:00pm - 8.00pm (EDT)

Location: New York

Calling Open Source Design enthusiasts living in NYC and around, please join us for our next meetup on funding free software.

Free software and money have always had a peculiar relationship. Many peoples are perplexed that libre licensed works can exist at all, when apparently no one is paid to maintain and develop them. Bitcoin has become a global phenomenon in recent months, and may become worth $100 or $100,000 by the end of this year; no one knows what might happen. At this meeting, long time libre font activist Dave Crossland will discuss the promise of programmable money for making free software financially sustainable.

Dave Crossland attended the first Libre Graphics Meeting in 2006, and became fascinated with the potential of unrestricted licensing to improve the design process. He spent the last 10 years working to liberate typography, mainly as a program manager for Google Fonts. He regularly contributes to the Crafting Type, TruFont and Metapolator projects.

The meetup will take place in ThoughtWorks offices, 99 Madison Avenue on Thursday January 18th, from 6.00pm to 8.00pm.

Date & Location

Date: Thurs, Jan 18 2018
Time: 6:00pm - 8.00pm (EDT)
Where: New York

Open Source Design NYC meetup recap - December 2017

Dinamichl, Atulvarma — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 14 December 2017

Location: New York, USA

The Big Idea

Top row: Julien Deswaef, Aaron Hymoff, Dina Michl, Atul Varma, Stephanie Daher, Dave Crossland Bottom row: Erika Enlund Not pictured: Jess Klein

Accessibility and Open Source

This talk was given by Atul Varma, who is known for building bridges of understanding between humans and machines. He has written illuminating software that’s been used as the centerpiece of TED Talks, in maker events around the world, and by individuals who are just trying to have a less frustrating time using their computer. But his favorite moments are very personal: understanding where another person is coming from, constructing a metaphor they can relate to, and using it to explain technology in a way that liberates, excites, and empowers.

Atul Varma presented at our meetup this month.

Accessibility

As designers/developers, we all understand the importance of inclusivity and web accessibility. We know that it means people with impairments, disabilities or aging can use, perceive, navigate, interact and understand the internet. Web accessibility encompasses all disabilities which include visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities. This is all well understood by our community of designer/developers but sometimes, it’s not always known how it works or how one is supposed to design with accessibility in mind. Currently most Web sites and Web software have barriers that make it difficult or impossible for many people with disabilities to use the Web. Raising awareness is just one step in helping lower these barriers.

Why Web Accessibility is Important Today, the net one of the most important resources in our day to day lives: research, education, employment, government, e-commerce, healthcare etc… It is key that the net be accessible in order to provide equal access and opportunity to people with disabilities and allow them to actively participate in society.

Atul’s Presentation and Slide Deck

Next meetup

Our upcoming meetup will take place place in ThoughtWorks offices, 99 Madison Avenue on Thursday the 18th of January, from 6.00pm to 8.00pm.

Date & Location

Date: Thurs, 18 Jan 2018
Time: 6:00pm - 8.00pm (EDT)
Where: Thoughtworks offices, New York
What: Funding free software presented by Dave Crossland

Please RSVP for the meetup at eventbrite

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design NYC: Dec 14 2017

Thu, 14 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Thurs, 14 Dec 2017

Time: 6:00pm - 8.00pm (EDT)

Location: New York

Calling Open Source Design enthusiasts living in NYC and around, please join us for our next meetup on looking at the intersection between accessibility, inclusive design, and open source. This will be given by Atul Varma, who is known for building bridges of understanding between humans and machines. He has written illuminating software that’s been used as the centerpiece of TED Talks, in maker events around the world, and by individuals who are just trying to have a less frustrating time using their computer. But his favorite moments are very personal: understanding where another person is coming from, constructing a metaphor they can relate to, and using it to explain technology in a way that liberates, excites, and empowers.

We hope to see you there!!!

The meetup will take place in ThoughtWorks offices, 99 Madison Avenue on Thursday 14th of December, from 6.00pm to 8.00pm.

Registration is open at Eventbrite

See you there.

Date & Location

Date: Thurs, 14 Dec 2017
Time: 6:00pm - 8.00pm (EDT)
Where: New York

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Talk on Design-driven Free Software at SFScon Bolzano 2017

Fri, 10 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: November 10th, 2017

Time: 12:30

Location: NOI Techpark, Bolzano (Italy)

SFSCon (South Tyrol Free Software Conference) is one of Europe’s most established annual conferences on Free Software. SFScon promotes the use of Free Software in IT infrastructures as a tool to achieve greater innovation and competitiveness in the region. Here decision-makers and developers meet, learn and get inspired.

Date and Location

Date: November 10th, 2017 Location: NOI Techpark, Bolzano (Italy)

Talk: Design-driven free software

Descripion

The free software movement has come a long way since the 1980s, but so far, it has failed to achieve its primary goal: Most people still use proprietary software and services for everyday computing tasks. One reason for this is that free software applications are difficult to use because they are built by developers for developers. Over the last two decades, there have been many attempts at improving free software usability and getting more designers involved. However, only a handful of projects have managed to do this in a way where it meaningfully improved the user experience. GNOME and elementary are two of the most prominent projects that have done this successfully and are therefore good case studies to learn from. I will talk about the history of how these projects came to be design-driven, how they integrated design into the free software development process, and how your project can do the same.

About the speaker

Tobias Bernard is an interaction designer living in Berlin. Originally from Merano, he got his BSc in Computer Science at the University of Bolzano and is currently studying Human-Computer Interaction and Design at TU Berlin. He’s part of the GNOME design team and member of the Open Source Design community.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design NYC 11-09 meetup Recap

Dinamichl, Jessklein — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: 9 November 2017

Location: New York, USA

The Big Idea - designing in open source.

Open source communities push collaboration, sharing and transparency throughout various industries. While design and creativity have never been more important, we often wonder where can designers who focus on open source projects share what they do, push their designs further and encourage other designers to join the community? Come to our meet up to learn more.

Who are we and where did we contribute last?

We are a collective of designers and design advocates who contribute to open source projects. Julien Deswaef, Jessica Klein and Dina Michl opened a chapter in NYC to meet regularly and grow the open source design community. In September, we held our first meeting to collaborate on defining what shape the meetups should take.

Top row: Julien Deswaef, Atul Varma, Dina Michl, Stephanie Daher Bottom row: Erika Enlund, Jess Klein, Stacy Cheng Not pictured: Stephanie Weber, Shandy Tsai, Tess (Thematizer)

Open Design Kit - Presentation by Jess Klein

Jess Klein presented Open Design Kit at our meetup this November.

Teaching people how to integrate design into their workflows has been a secondary focus of Jess Klein’s career. Her experience while working in the design community is nothing but interesting and diverse. Having led and contributed to many open source education and civic projects, she’s had to learn to work with her teams all over the world.

As any designer knows, beginning a new project often requires establishing a process and collaboration tools to ensure that development is a success for every member of the product team. Klein says that “understanding why we are doing a design phase on a project, what’s the value of design?” is often a central question to open projects.

Jess and team came up with several strategies to help people understand how to collaborate with designers or on design. This included taking advantage of many different types of tools, such as presentations, blog posts, and contracts. She encourages her teams to design openly and to address conversation expectations and contributions. Throughout her work, she began to use these tools to aid her design process and wanted to make them accessible to the design community.

The project was incubated with the design team at Bocoup (where she was the Principal Designer), and since this Summer has been a completely community managed initiative. There are many active contributors (all who are mentioned by name in the GitHub README file) to the project and she is inviting more community participation to generate a more accessible and inclusive resource.

So, why is another kit needed? Jess was quick to point out that there are many great and useful toolkits out in the ecosystem already. The reasons another kit is needed is that existing kits are: specific to studios and organizations, focus on co-located teams, challenging for clients and stakeholders to see themselves doing the method without buying into the whole philosophy and don’t often embrace the fact that there are many different ways to approach a problem space.

Several toolkits inspired the project including: designkit.org (IDEO field guide) Gov.uk - (design principles manual), 18F Method Cards. But none of the kits out there addressed her remote reality. Opendesignkit.org was written for different types of users, this allowed for a specific focus on the type of language used. It is currently being used by large and small sized organizations and many freelancers.

“It’s unique because it’s not associated with a specific organization, so teams can use the kit freely on projects and take ownership of the content and interpretation.”

The minimum loveable product was defined as a combination of creating a few methods and a process and then testing those on a few different projects.

The initial release of the Kit has focused on highlighting “remote - first” methods for collaboration. As can be seen in the Affinity Diagram method, the Kit is not prescriptive but shows how you might approach problem solving.

Synthesize information with the remote team friendly sorting exercise of Affinity Diagramming.

Usability Testing Takeaways

Now that the Minimum Loveable Product has been out for a bit, several fixes and updates have been identified, including:

focus on putting the process up front
Add CC licensed templates (design templates) to support the methods
Write guides on more complex topics that will combine many methods
Showcase what possibilities exist for Open Source tools (write up of tools)
Incorporate linked examples and case studies
Localization
Licensing - based on copyright

Questions, Suggestions and Next Steps:

After the talk, we discussed the need to establish consist of language in terms of jargon via a style guide. This will help to develop a universal language and practice of collaborating and problem solving.

We also talked about the urgent need to have a license for the Kit in general as it is what Julien Deswaef called a “contract with the contributor.”

Some suggestions were made by the meetup including optimizing the kit for low internet bandwidth - looking at a pattern, to have a low bandwidth option and focusing on how to make the Kit more including users with different capabilities.

To contribute to the project, join the #opendesignkit channel on the Open Design Foundation Slack, or check out the GitHub repository.

Slides:

View the Open Design Kit presentation on Google Slides

Next meetup

Our upcoming meetup will take place place in ThoughtWorks offices, 99 Madison Avenue on Thursday the 14th of December, from 6.00pm to 8.00pm.

Date & Location

Date: Thurs, 14 Dec 2017
Time: 6:00pm - 8.00pm (EDT)
Where: Thoughtworks offices, New York
What: Intersection between accessibility, inclusive design, and open source presented by Atul Varma

A little bit about Atul Varma:

Atul enjoys building bridges of understanding between humans and machines. He has written illuminating software that’s been used as the centerpiece of TED Talks, in maker events around the world, and by individuals who are just trying to have a less frustrating time using their computer. But his favorite moments are very personal: understanding where another person is coming from, constructing a metaphor they can relate to, and using it to explain technology in a way that liberates, excites, and empowers.

Please RSVP for the meetup at eventbrite

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design NYC: Nov 09 2017

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Thurs, 09 Nov 2017

Time: 6:00pm - 8.00pm (EDT)

Location: New York

Calling Open Source Design enthusiasts living in NYC and around to join us for our next meetup on open design toolkit. This will be a fun evening reviewing Jessica Klein’s toolkit and discussion how it can/will help the design OS community.

The meetup will take place in ThoughtWorks offices, 99 Madison Avenue on Thursday 09th of November, from 6.00pm to 8.00pm.

Registration is open at Eventbrite

See you there.

Date & Location

Date: Thurs, 09 Nov 2017
Time: 6:00pm - 8.00pm (EDT)
Where: New York

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open source design first NYC meetup

dinamichl, jessklein — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: October 2017

Location: New York, USA

The Big Idea - designing in open source Open source communities pushed collaboration, sharing and transparency (in regards to licensing and copyright) throughout various industries. While design and creativity have never been more important, we often wonder where can designers who focus on open source projects share what they do, push their designs further and encourage other designers to join the community? Enter the Open Source Design NYC Collective.

Who are we and where did we contribute last? We are a collective of designers and design advocates who contribute to open source projects. Julien Deswaef, Jessica Klein and Dina Michl opened a chapter in NYC to meet regularly and grow the open source design community. In September, we held our first meeting to collaborate on defining what shape the meetups should take.

Top row: Atul Varma, Julien Deswaef, Brian Carr, Dina Michl Bottom row: Jess Klein, Dave Crossland Not pictured: Dixie Ching

Collaborative Mind-mapping and Affinity Diagramming At the first meetup, we got to know one another through a series of design exercises (what else?!). Additionally, we needed to establish what our collective mission would be and how we might organize future get togethers. We asked the following questions:

What kind of meetup excites you?
What excites you about open and open source design?
Sticky clustering
What common themes are emerging?

Sticky clustering happened!!

Themes

Through the affinity diagramming activity, we determined that there are about nine core themes that the group was interested in supporting through the meetup. These themes are:

Sharing
Education
Community
N00b Friendly
Social Atmosphere
Participatory
Accessibility
Multidisciplinary
Toolboxes and Workflow

These themes will act as kind of our design values for developing out the concept for the meetup. Whatever shape the ultimate meetup takes, these themes will help us to frame future conversations around what success might look like for us.

Break out groups: The themes informed a deep conversation about our mission and how we were to organize future sessions so they would be a success. We wondered What kind of impact do we want to have 1 year from now?

It was clear that as a group we all wanted to focus on sharing and applying knowledge of design within open source parameters but also keep a broader context that would avoid us only focusing on open source tools. Design needs to be a priority for open source so we having peers share knowledge and tips will only support and spurn much needed design growth. As a result, we decided that the meetups will have two core elements to them:

Presentations - gathering of peers (using community to build design)
Making - applying knowledge (using design to build community)

Share-out and Next Steps (identify guest speakers, etc) Our upcoming meetup will take place place in ThoughtWorks offices, 99 Madison Avenue on Thursday the 9th of November, from 6.30pm to 8.30pm.

Date & Location

Date: Thurs, 09 Nov 2017
Time: 6:00pm - 8.00pm (EDT)
Where: Thoughtworks offices, 15th Fl, New York
What: Open Source Design Kit

We will start to put some of this theory into action by attempting to run the meetup and iterate from there. Thank you for your interest and please stop by and say hello!

You can RSVP for the meetup at eventbrite

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design Summit: Berlin, Oct 13-18 2017

Fri, 13 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 - Wed, 18 Oct 2017

Time: full days

Location: Berlin

We’re organizing a summit for all designers and developers interested in cheerleading great design in open source. It will take place in Berlin.

October 13 is the arrival day with a social event in the evening. 14-15 are unconf days, 16-17 workshops/discussion, 18 is maybe brunch but also leaving day.

Please see https://opensourcedesign.net/summit/2017 for more information and https://opencollective.com/opensourcedesign/events/opensourcedesign-summit to express interest in attending! You are also welcome to join the conversation on GitHub.

Date & Location

Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 - Wed, 18 Oct 2017
Time: Full days
Where: Berlin

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design Event Madrid 2017

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Wed, 31 May 2017

Time: 19:00

Location: Madrid, Spain

Fist meetup event in Madrid

It’s been great event, thank everyone who showed up and kudos @victoria-bondarchuk and @Xaviju for effort kick-starting it Madrid!

A summary of the things that we discussed:

What can we do together?

Bring more designers
Bring more projects
Teach about open source

Open questions rose though the discussion:

How to recruit more designers? More than half of the people were on the engineering/business side.
How design process works in your organization?
Open surce project that need designers?
Teach opensource? (git? Inkscape? GitHub?)
Bring some projects that we like, that we could work on (all stages) as a group
Is there list of local opensource projects that might need help? OSWeekend
Build a reference: list of open-source alternatives for designer tools?? (Xavi: alt tools for illustrations and animation, tutorials and workflows)
Existing groups in Madrid: ladies UX, UXacademy, interaction design foundation
A page: why a designer want to contribute or be using to OSS?
Are there a successful cases of UX?

Date & Location

Date: Wed, 31 May 2017
Time: 19:00
Where: Madrid

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design track at OpenTechSummit 2017

Thu, 25 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Thu, 25 May 2017

Time: 10:00-18:30

Location: freiLand, Berlin-Potsdam

OpenTechSummit had its first Open Source Design track this year, which we organized!

You can see some pictures on Twitter searching for ‘opensourcedesign opentechsummit’.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design intro at G23 conference 2017

Sat, 06 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Sat, 6 May 2017

Time: 10:00-18:00

Location: Säälchen am Holzmarkt, Berlin

The Chaos Computer Club Berlin organized a G23 unconference, bringing together activists on privacy, decentralization and related topics.

We briefly presented Open Source Design under the title Du hast was gehackt, aber aufs Design gekackt? (loosely translated You hacked a bit but the design is shit?).

We have a tweet about the funny session title. ;)

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Foss North, Gothenberg 2017

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: April 26th, 2017

Time: pending

Location: Folkets hus, Gothenburg

Foss North is an free / open source conference covering both software and hardware from the technical perspective. Hosted in Gothenburg between Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm with an international airport, we provide a meeting place for the Nordic foss communities and will bring together great speakers with a great audience.

Date and Location

Date: April 26th, 2017 Location: Folkets hus, Gothenburg

Talk Proposal

Title

The UX of UX - Behind the scenes of effectively designing in the open

Descripion

Open source software has always been engineering driven. Most of the people building open source software are engineers with major turn on for features and more features which kind of explains how a lot of open source projects have rich and extremely important features but are a pain to see or work with. This talk aims to deal with this problem of designing in the open which is often neglected. Tools like GitHub, GitLab, etc. can actually become an arena for usability testing and give extremely promising output only if it follows an effective design process. This talk is also a practical guide for budding designers to get started with open source software.

About the speaker

Ragy Nayyar, 23, is a post graduate student in Interaction Design at KTH, Stockholm. Prior to this he has worked, both as a designer and a developer for both big companies and startups for around 2 years. He has been a contributor to open source since he started writing code and majority of my contributions are related to front-end programming and user experience decisions. He started contributing to ownCloud when they were not even on GitHub, but on Gitorious and now its one of the highest contributed PHP project on GitHub. He does pretty much the same thing at Nextcloud now in his free time. He co-authored and designed the Nextcloud and ownCloud calendar which is one of the most famous self hosted calendar solutions. He loves writing CSS and building scalable CSS architectures.

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design Meetup Berlin, April 20, 2017

Wed, 19 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Thu, 20 April 2017

Time: 19:00 - 22:00 (UTC +1:00)

Location: Mozilla Berlin Community Space - Haus 12, Voltastr. 5, 13355 Berlin

We welcome everyone to join us in connecting with people to promote and improve open source design. We value learning and sharing freely through both our processes and results. Come and have a good time, exchange ideas, and solve problems with us. Chat about remote usability tests on a budget, or how one could involve an online community in the design process. We might also discuss the trade offs between various open source tools, or brainstorm some ideas to promote libre design projects to university students. The possibilities are endless!

FAQ:

Q: Do I need to be a programmer, designer, [some other role] to participate? A: No, interest in design and in sharing your process and results with others is enough.

Q: What does the “open source design” mean? A: It means that we aim to share process and results of our design projects for others to learn from and to build upon it. You can see it in contrast to a secretive, non-collaborative design process which often results in things that are not licensed in a way that others can reuse and build upon the work.

Q: Is this constrained to Mozilla products and services? A: No. Mozilla is involved (and donated the space!) but there are other projects on board, too. Everyone and everything is welcome!

Q: What do you mean by design? A: We mean it broadly, encompassing activities like need research, interaction design, graphic design and usability testing.

Looking forward to seeing you soon!

Date & Location

Date: Thu. 20th April 2017
Time: 19:00 - 22:00 (UCT +1)
Where: Mozilla Berlin Community Space - Haus 12, Voltastr. 5, 13355 Berlin, Berlin, Berlin

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design Meetup Berlin, Mar 15, 2017

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Fr, 15 March 2017

Time: 19:00 - 22:00 (UTC +1:00)

Location: Mozilla Berlin Community Space - Haus 12, Voltastr. 5, 13355 Berlin

FAQ:

Q: Do I need to be a programmer, designer, [some other role] to participate? A: No, interest in design and in sharing your process and results with others is enough.

Q: Is this constrained to Mozilla products and services? A: No. Mozilla is involved (and donated the space!) but there are other projects on board, too. Everyone and everything is welcome!

Q: What do you mean by design? A: We mean it broadly, encompassing activities like need research, interaction design, graphic design and usability testing.

Looking forward to seeing you soon!

Link on meetup.com

Date & Location

Date: Fr. 15th March 2017
Time: 19:00 - 22:00 (UCT +1)
Where: Mozilla Berlin Community Space - Haus 12, Voltastr. 5, 13355 Berlin, Berlin, Berlin

Meeting Notes

Notes taken on etherpad

Attendees: Jan D, Jan M, Peter, Heiko, Hernan, Charlie, Sam, Michael, Ettore, Amin, Tobias. Did I miss anybody?

Goals of this meeting:

how can we build community for usability/design people to support each other?
it doesn’t work so well to integrate design & usability ideas into traditional (code-centric) open source projects
how can we create a more neutral field for non-code contributors to take part?

Jan Muehlig talked about his own experience of successes and failures in regards to bringing usability concepts into F/LOSS projects - many different research projects were undertaken (eg during the Season of Usability, though often efforts fell short when it came to developers actually implementing the lessons learned.

Stumbling blocks were often the code-centric culture of open source - a ‘contributor’ is someone who writes code - that is the traditional way into a community of trust and collaboraion. There was often no way in for UX or other non-code contributions.

Various hurdles were discussed - one interesting aspect of F/LOSS development is that there are many mechanisms to ‘add’ features… but none to ‘remove’ them! The idea that ’the bigger the buffet, the better it must be’ prevails and leads to bloated, confusing, awkward jack-of-all-trades software.

Sam shared an example of successful community integration / transition from Kdenlive, the video editor he relies upon for work. For many years almost all of the code has come from only one developer, Jean-Baptiste Mardelle - and as you might expect, he burned out and almost left the project for good back in 2013. But in the last two years there has beeen a resurgence of enthusiasm and activity around Kdenlive, led by a small group of active users, design and documentation contributors, together with JBM and other programmers, focused around informal IRC chats called ‘Kdenlive Cafés’, in which technical and creative aspects of video editing are discussed, as well as use of the software, bugs and features, and the progress of Kdenlive as a community and project. ‘Bug squashing days’ were organised with different roles for different technical abilities, and strategies to bring in more developers were fleshed out. This helped form a sense of community and shared stewardship of the project, got it out of a rough patch from a development, and made clear to everybody what value there can be in non-code contributions. Obviously this is a special case because a sole-developer at the point of burnout creates a power vacuum which doesn’t exist in many other F/LOSS projects, but I think the not-entirely-technical Café can be a good way in for non-code contributors even within traditionally code-centric projects.

We talked a lot about user testing, and differences between the open and closed worlds. eg Amazon is constantly A/B testing, netflix too - gathering customer feedback all the time as well.

There’s a common myth that user testing is all or nothing - you either have a uni research team with proper lab methods, or not at all. But even flawed user prototyping (eg testing on your own team) can be useful in a way, even if it’s not optimal it’s better than nothing (as long as you acknowledge that it is flawed).

Jan D.: read on paper prototyping, discount usability testing or guerilla reserach if you are interested

A question was asked about the 2007 example of InGimp as a way to automate user testing:

InGimp’s tools map improve FOSS usability

Peter was working with Gimp at the time, so could offer some insight:

“ingimp was an interesting but flawed experiment. It didn’t work because you don’t understand the data. You don’t know what someone was thinking when they clicked there - was that long pause because they didn’t know what to do, or because they got a phone call? Quantative data without context isn’t much help.”

However, some group members advocated for using such quantitative data, but not as the only source used for development.

elementary, gnome, nextcloud as positive examples of design-inclusive communities. usually these are the newer projects.

We discussed more radical approaches… “ok, I have a stupid idea… what about a governance fork to force culture change?” maintaining the same codebase - with a different set of values. “I can make your idea even worse: parallel maintainership - code on one side, design and usability on the other, wiith consensus needed before a release.”

Ok, we need to have a meeting together with developers to talk about this topic. Try to understand difficulties on both sides and start something together.

We then split into 3 groups for more focused discussions:

Links

Tools

What do we have? What are we missing?

Justinmind is interesting but closed source
Jan D. uses draw
Is paying for tools ok?
Pidoco for collaboration (closed source)
Not the tool is the problem but that the format are not free
Jitsi, Hangouts for the process
Writing on an image of the screen while user testing (highlighting) may be a cool plugin for jitsi
Extend etherpad
Bugzilla “broke down” when UX Bugs were involved

Community

How do we engage UX & design people with OS, and vice versa? How can we build a community around this idea?

How can we counter fears of Designers
Just take my designer
I cant code
How can we organize a community
How can we define a common interest
Projects-Centric? UX? Visual?
Documenting Knowledge as a culture
Best practices
Build up experiences and skills
Making it accessible
Onboarding
Matching people with projects
Incentivize being part of the community
Learning and failures
Code of Conduct for projects that want to collaborate with the community to protect the community
Community activities
Communicating the mission
How do people get to know about us
Need for funding, having a small hackathon etc.

Comment:

Diversity on the “simple” level of “it is not just code” AND it may also be a step into the direction of “there are any different people / approaches to add to our projects”

Positive Cases

Elementery attracted people who were interested in BUILDING and DESIGN https://.twitter.com/elementary/status/842462739536719875
…but maybe they have a core group of people, onboarding not very visible
Gnome: Redshift had a well structured dialog between the design oriented community members with the developers
JASP may be an example for another successful tool: they want to build a statistics application that can be used by beginners. One incentive is that they want to make an often overlooked branch of statistics, bayesian testing, more visible (and better taught). They are backed by unis, funding and statisticians interested in education. Jamovi is a more feature oriented branch,
They documented best practices e.g. what they did if something could not be implemented in the GTK lib
As a dev you get in contact with other peoples code; for designers it is very different; designers could do it differently
Maybe templates for people to express theri ideas. Could be visual, resources etc.
An dev can build upon libs by others. Can a designer build upon?
A treasure trove for designers

How can we build and integrate a non-dev community? to recruit/onboard/make them happy.

open usability: tackled universities
usability professional association:
take real issues to universities.

forum/exchange platform want to get out of cocoon, and widen his vision, and do design in a big process. where were they successful or didn’t succeed.

how can we define a common interest?
how can we organise the community?
how can we make a successful onboarding process?
how can we incentivise being part of the community? engage people
how can we counter fears? identify them as well
how can we build up and spread FOSS experiences and skills?
how can we document UX knowledge?
how can we match contributors with open source projects?
Code of conduct for projects
Permanent learning from projects including failures.
How can we fund the community activities?
communicating the open source ux movement. advertising. how do people know about us?

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Internet Freedom Festival 2017

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Tue, 6 March 2017 - Fri, 10 March 2017

Time: All day

Location: Calle de Juan Verdeguer 16, 46024 – Valencia, Spain

The Internet Freedom Festival creates a common space where diverse communities working against and affected by censorship and surveillance can come together to teach, plan and act.

The Communications and Design theme will connect designers, users, and developers to keep the tools secure and usable.

This conjunction will lead to activities such as UX/UI brainstorms for new and improved tools, usability workshops for developers, and opportunities for users to share their highly valuable experience and recommendations.

Sessions can take the format of: workshops, trainings, hackathons, presentations, panel discussions, networking events, or if you have a different format, suggest it!

The call for session proposals is for designers, user researchers (and everyone working in user experience) who want to contribute their knowledge, experience or time to projects working on Internet freedom, anti-censorship and surveillance.

Closing date for submitting a session proposal is the 2nd of October

Date & Location

Date: Tue 6th - Fri 10th March 2017
Time: All day
Where: Calle de Juan Verdeguer 16, 46024 – Valencia, Spain

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →

Open Source Design track at FOSDEM 2017

Sun, 05 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2017

Time: pending

Location: Université Libre Brussels (Solbosch campus), Belgium

FOSDEM is one of the biggest open source conferences. For the third time there will be a dedicated Open Source Design track!

Who coordinates the Open Source Design track

The Open Source Design track is coordinated by the Open Source Design Crowd at opensourcedesign.net

Read more on opensourcedesign.net →