Open Source Festival 2020

Talk Description

Open Source Design has huge challenges before it can 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.

The first part of 'Open Design' was a collaborative project between Adobe, Designit and Ushahidi. A creative proprietary software, global design agency and a humanitarian, technology non-profit creating open source tools 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 workshops on Ushahidi's 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, but also some practical tips on structuring issues, labelling and maintaining design (and extended functions like research, UX and product management), working with the methodology and workshop framework, running remote design sprints and writing design documentation. You’ll leave with a set of tools and methods you can apply to your OSS to engage with designers.

A 60-minute workshop for OSS maintainers to start building issues for designers in their repos and for designers to learn and practice how to engage with OSS projects.