Eriol Fox

The Usable Software Ecosystem Research (USER) project was initiated by Superbloom Design and funded by the Sloan Foundation. It explores how Scientific & Research open- source software teams understand, consider, and undertake usability and design opportunities in their projects. Through a variety of design research methods such as literature reviews, semi- structured interviews, surveys, and ecosystem mapping, the research aims to obtain a better understanding of: 1. How norms in academic, science, and/or open- source working environments affect the choices teams make around their users and different kinds of design interventions. 2. How team dynamics and trust affects those choices. 3. What teams would need to be interested in or able to prioritize usability and design in their work. In this short talk, we'll give an overview of our findings but specifically zoom in on the ways in which Scientific and Research OSS (S&R OSS) contributors/teams leverage community spaces, interactions and documents to make user-informed choices about how to make their documentation and tools better. There will then be a critical review of how design research trained individuals might iterate and improve on these practices to make usability and design even better in S&R OSS.

Open Source Software is typically maintained by small groups of enthusiastic developers with growing involvement from the design community. However, FLOSS is not just developer tools and certainly not limited to ‘linux’ and ‘APIs’ there are huge amounts of FLOSS out there that can benefit from better usability for all users (not just the creator and core maintainers!). FLOSS is starting to understand how UX/UI/Usability 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 and we’re here to help with this short, active workshop for non-designers in FLOSS to begin to work with design principles and tasks that help you to embrace and understand what design brings as well as know what to ask for in terms of design for your FLOSS as well as feeling prepared to participate in design for FLOSS.

Other people: Django Skorupa ngọc triệu

In this session, FOSS projects as given time to present and ask for contributions to the designers in the room. Each project is given 2 minutes to present. In those 2 minutes, they should briefly introduce the project, explain what design help they need, and provide contact details so designers can reach them after FOSDEM.

The Open Source Design collective will use the information to submit a "job" for each project to the Open Source Design "jobs board" (https://opensourcedesign.net/jobs/), so that the request for design help reaches not just the designers in the room, but also the wider design community.

The Sustaining open source design podcast has been hosting conversations about open source and design over the last year with designers of all kinds across the spectrum of open source software projects. From new to open source to long term contributors and from practicing visual designers to design researchers. We've spent over 30 hours in conversation with designers and we are coming together as hosts to discuss the main themes throughout these conversations in 2021 at FOSDEM 2022 with a look ahead to what might come up in 2022 for design in OSS.

This will be a conversation between hosts of the SOS design podcast: Eriol Fox, Georgia Bullen, Memo Esparza, Peace Omejeh and Richard Littuar

https://sosdesign.sustainoss.org/

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Other people: Georgia Bullen Memo Esparza

So you’ve done some user testing or usability testing as an open source software team and now you have interesting user insights collected. But...what do you do with it? How does user feedback correspond to issues in the backlog? How do you get the wider OSS community team up to speed if they haven’t been part of the synthesis process? These are some of the questions you may ask yourself after participating in user testing or usability testing. You’re ready for a synthesis process!

The USABLE team has already published two resources about user testing and usability testing, now they are presenting their third resource about user insight synthesis. You’ll see how they supported open source software tool teams to work with user insights in an open source way of user testing, usability and synthesis work. In this session you will observe how the USABLE team supported OSS tool teams with user insight synthesis processes with detailed explanations of why, how and when to do synthesis. You will also view clips of a previous closed session in which the USABLE team and OSS tool teams collaborated on a synthesis work session.

So you’ve done some user testing or usability testing as an open source software team and now you have interesting user insights collected. But...what do you do with it? How does user feedback correspond to issues in the backlog? How do you get the wider OSS community team up to speed if they haven’t been part of the synthesis process? These are some of the questions you may ask yourself after participating in user testing or usability testing. You’re ready for a synthesis process!

The USABLE team has already published two resources about user testing and usability testing, now they are presenting their third resource about user insight synthesis. You’ll see how they supported open source software tool teams to work with user insights in an open source way of user testing, usability and synthesis work. In this session you will observe how the USABLE team supported OSS tool teams with user insight synthesis processes with detailed explanations of why, how and when to do synthesis. You will also view clips of a previous closed session in which the USABLE team and OSS tool teams collaborated on a synthesis work session.

Other people: Kelsey Smith

Every year we take some time to introduce the Open Source Design collective, what we do, where to find us and how to get involved.

Other people: Bernard Tyers

Designers are still relatively rare in the FL/OSS space and those that have been around and active are burning out and struggling to peer support each other effectively. I see mentoring designers, new to open source software as a key way in which we can make FLOSS sustainable generally and specifically for the designer community in FLOSS.

In this session, I'll be outlining what I've observed and done as a 'mentor' in the FLOSS design space. What I've tried to do to support designers new to FLOSS in order to 'boost' our numbers actively contributing and keeping our community and OSS healthy. But there's plenty of ground unexplored here, which is why I'd like to spend half of the session actively workshopping via a shared etherpad document how we can mentor designers more sustainably withing FLOS.

What is needed by those that want mentoring? What do FLOSS projects need support with? How can mentors share resources and processes?

and likely, many more questions to collaboratively work on.

Ushahidi builds OSS humanitarian tools, remotely for some of the most marginalized 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 events on our OSS 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.

In this session, we'll briefly cover the history of the project and the main problems we attempted to solve and we'll present the learning and adaptions to our 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.

Looking into some the abstract deeper motivations for design professionals to contribute but also some practical tips on structuring issues, labelling and maintaining design (and extended functions like research, UX and product management) you'll leave with a set of tools and methods you can apply to your OSS to engage with designers.