Jan Borchardt – Building the Open Source Design Community

What’s out there in open source design.

An overview of what’s happening in open source design today by @Jancborchardt

Sharing the knowledge

Large open source projects have more resources and are sharing their expertise. Learn from them:

Sharing methods

Two strategies for getting usability work integrated in existing developer workflows:

  • Define a set of UX related tags you can use in the bug tracker. Best to keep it simple and start with one catch-all “Design” tag instead of breaking it out in too specific subtags
  • Build a design team. Create a channel for design related discussion. Existing channels on IRC are #Gnome-design, #drupal-usability #ux (Mozilla) #wikimedia-design, #owncloud-design, #opensourcedesign

The million dollar question pops up early: where to find designers for our open source projects?

Existing initiatives

Jan is also working with universities, introducing some open source projects to the students and having them work on it. A low barrier way to get new people involved.

Meet and collaborate

Get together, meet each other face to face and get the cross-project exchange started. Share experience and resources. Today is exciting, the first designer meetup at FOSDEM. Lets get busy!