Background and Objectives

I’ve been maintaining open source design.net (OSD) alongside a core group of other designer-maintainers for around 5 years. OSD is a crucial open source project that is still lead and managed by a group of unpaid volunteers. They advocate for design (broadly) in open source software and for designers to better understand the opportunities open source software can offer them.

Maintaining an OSS community comes with it’s challenges. The project has a decent amount of notoritey and support yet has struggled to solidfy it’s governance processes as we have gained both monetary funds and influence in the OSS and design space.

Impact

My impact on the Open Source Design community group has been most notable where I made efforts to maintain reliable communications, community events and calls as well as make sure routine maintenance of our core capabilities carried on. Making sure the the jobs posting page was workinga nd encouraging new submissions as well as working through old posts and closing them on a yearly basis. Ensuring the community is maintained is about as impactful as you can get in small, community led open source projects.

Outputs

Maintainance duties include:

  • Facilitating a monthly community call, gathering talking points from the community and wiriting up notes.
  • Social media messaging
  • Forum moderation and github project maintainance
  • Organising community voting schemes on how to distribute funds and what to invest research in.
  • Applying for and managing a devroom at the conference FOSDEM which typically also includes an inforamtion stand.
  • Supporting with critical technical maintainance issues with our website and job board infrastructure.

New skills

Understanding how OSS maintains itself has been the huge new skill learning for my work with Open Source Design. I now have a better understanding of OSS governance, community engagement, finances/fundraising, running conference call for proposals and many,many more skills related to how OSS is built, maintained and sustained.


An image from the design and UX clinic that I help organise and participate in as part of OSD


Our jobs site that is maintained by myself and other volunteers


The maintainance work that I do on our jobs list which includes making sure jobs are still active and relevant to OSS projects