Using your design skills for good with Humanitarian open source

By Eriol Fox

Elevator Pitch

Open Source Software (OSS) typically maintained by developers are starting to understand how design improves their OSS, but struggle to know how to bring designers into the ‘open source’ world

This short workshop is an introduction on how designers can become involved in open source.

Description

Open Source Software (OSS) is typically maintained by small groups of enthusiastic developers with growing involvement from the design community. However, OSS is not just developer tools and certainly not limited to ‘linux’ and ‘APIs’ there are huge amounts of projects focussed on causes ‘for good’ from tools that help asylum seekers find free legal help to services for people fleeing domestic abuse.

These OSS tools are starting to understand how UX design improves how they do their work, but are struggling to know how to bring designers into an ‘open source’ world where the processes, community and focus has historically been developer lead.

Come to this short workshop for an introduction on how designers can become involved in open source and make a group contribution to an open source humanitarian tool.

Notes

Best done as a team workshop of around 4-7 people per group across a full day between 4-6 hours.

Can include a remote design sprint for 1 week afterwards.

There is a 90 mins version of the workshop for the very beginning parts.