Superbloom are delighted to announce the launch of our new findings document: ‘Designers in OSS: Summary of diary studies of designers contributing to OSS’. We would appreciate your support in spreading the word about our diary study based research about the life of designers as they contribute to OSS over a 10 to 16 week period.
Email to share our blog post and findings document on GitHub, or share a PDF with your audiences.
Tweet/Mastodon toot, post to Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook or your preferred social media platform!
Include the findings document or a link to our blog post in your next newsletter. Below this message you will find sample text to share the findings document and/or blog post with your contacts. Please tweak the message as you see fit!
To discuss the findings document or blog post further, or to work with us, please get in touch via: OSSdesignerdiaries@superbloom.design.
Thanks!
Eriol & the Designers in OSS research team at Superbloom
We would be grateful if you would help us to spread the word by posting on social media using a combination of #opensourcedesign#opensource#designers and #OSSdesign and tagging @sprblm_ for amplification.
Congrats and thank you, what an awesome study. I only read through the blog post (and shared it), but I can tell there is material for a lot of discussions.
On the topic of weekly diaries, there are three of us in the Bitcoin Design Community that post weekly updates about our open-source contributions. We try to write these for ourselves and just be direct and honest, but end up probably still a bit more reserved than ones done in a privacy-preserving study like yours. Might still be of interest, so here they are: GBKS, Mo, HoneyBadger.
Another great way to promote building public is through hackathons. Bolt.fun organizes ones that can last 1-3 months. Throughout the process, teams are asked to share weekly updates as so-called PPPs (Plans, Progress, Problems, described here). This is also a judging criteria for prizes (makes judging easier also because progress is so visible).
This could make for a good Twitter Space topic (or some other public discussion forum that is less of a dumpster fire). Anyhow, hope we see more open design activity in the future.
Ooo thanks for the links to the bitcoin design folks writing. Superbloom (the org I work at) has done 2 week design ‘sprints’ for OSS tools and designers (called underexposed) before and theres the work I did on Open Design when I was at Ushahidi but I agree - hackathons and design events work well for initial involvement but sustained remote collaboration was best done by the global design sprints project (before it went monetised imo) We mostly struggle to get these kinds of things funded by orgs that do fund OSS. It’s funny because when i speak to OSS projects they want to receive design contributions, but the expectation is that design contributions take the same effort as code contributions which is mostly untrue.
Once we can crack the funding justification problem, theres loads we could pursue, redo etc. re. hackathons and events but until we can make it sustainable, we can only inject some energy into it at a time.
Definitely not easy. It of course helps a lot when there are practical benefits to an org from a hackathon. Some may sponsor just for the glory (aka exposure). Others want to build a community around their platform or project and maybe sponsor a prize for teams who build on their stuff. VCs sometimes support if they see potential of beginnings of important products maybe being built. And for others it might be a potential hiring pool. These things might not be obvious though and might need to be conveyed by success stories from prior events, etc. But it also really depends on the goal of the event. Some hackathons are just for fun, others have intense ambitions of growing the next generation of world-changing thought-leader digital prophets.
Regarding amount of design contribution, there are various surveys that find designer–to–developer ratios of 1-5 or 1-6, or even 1-10, pretty common. I’d assume it’s the same in open-source, and probably also not too different from other contributors like project managers, translators, etc. Design will probably always have to explain and make a case for itself in many ways.
