Elevator Pitch
This short workshop is aimed at getting OSS projects ready for design contributions.
You’ll have never asked for or set up issues ready for OSS designers.
Covering the best first issues to attract design contributions and the processes involved in building a ‘design wing’ of your OSS community.
Description
Open Source design has a plethora of hurdles to leap before it could become fully adopted by the global design community. Exploitative ‘work for free attitudes’, workflows and how design functions/roles connect up through a product life cycle, how our software doesn’t yet allow for robust and collaborative versioning across different designers and how the open source community as a whole, is over represented by those with privilege, access and ability.
Ushahidi builds humanitarian tools, remotely for some of the most marginalised people across the globe. To tackle these systemic problems with how to ‘open source’ a design effort and bring the community along with the, ‘on-staff’ Ushahidi designers, we’ve been piloting a series of design jams on our crisis communication tool TenFour with our partners Designit and Adobe. Together, we’re looking to solve the problems with how open source design can work by engaging through meaningful technology that makes a difference in the world.
We’re here to take you through that journey and what we’ve learnt about design contributions to OSS.
Notes
Can be delivered by 1 individual from the Open Design team or up to 3 of them.
We’ve all been in design between 10 and 25 years and advocates for open source software and tech for good for more than half those years. We’ve been working intensely over the last year on how best to engage the wider design community in contributing to OSS and humanitarian tech projects in a sustainable way.