 Okay, hi everybody. My name is Katina Moraru. Before starting, I was just wanting to ask you a couple of questions and I want to know how many designers are here. Okay, so three designers. Okay, that's great. And who did contribute to any open source project even if it was a development? Okay, I wanted to see who didn't. But okay, lots of people. Well, so I've been contributing to XWK from the past 10 years and I've been employed for 8. And I started as a GSOC student and GSOC is very nice because from all the open source projects that are on GitHub, there's a selection of the projects that are open to new contributors. But the problem there is it only goes if you're a university student and they don't accept styling content. So how can a designer contribute to open source if they don't know if that organization is interesting or not? Regers, Summer of Code has some tasks for designers. But in the end, we try to create this organization which is opensourcedesign.net and there we posted the jobs for open source designers and also encouraged organizations to post their jobs there. This way they have a way to find the jobs related to this. So if finding a community is the hardest part, then you need to let the organization know what's your motivation. I would like it to be more interactive. Can you tell me some motivations open source designers could have to join your open source project or why they would do it? This is a question also for developers, but for a designer it might be a bit more specific. It's very difficult for young designers to become part of a big project with an open source. If you're welcome. Okay, so portfolio is a good thing and it's mostly targeted to new designers that want to do that. The problem is that when you're trying to build a portfolio, it means that you need to have multiple projects. So the commitment in that open source project might not be for a long time. And you should tell that community that you plan to do that. First, they could give you... Can we test new ideas like quite an experimental one, maybe in a commercial application? Okay, experimenting is interesting. Again, it depends on how much expertise that designer has and also the community how open is to experiment. You need to have a very open mind to do that. But it's important to tell the communities what your motivations are. Because, for example, they could give you easier tasks or, as you say, experiment or hard tasks and they could accept that. If you're a more senior designer, sharing experience could be also motivation. Or if you're a student, you might want to gain some money. On the opposite design jobs, you will see that there are some jobs that give money for open design contributions, but not that many. But still, this is something that we might want to have in the future. Because that would assure a continuous flow of contributions. Now, regarding expertise, if you read those jobs, some are very vague. One owner of a project might think they want a designer, but they will not describe very well what design means. And as UX is very ambiguous and everybody understands what they want from it, it could contain from usability to graphic designs and so a lot of other things. And it's very important for you, if you're a new designer, to know what your expertise is and also how you can match. Because if you look at that board, you see lots of requests for graphic design. So new communities, they want a logo or they want a web home. But we discuss here about usability testing and some interacting designers are very eager to do that especially because in open source it's very hard. Some tools need to be installed, but the audience is quite broad and we can do remote. But this matching and seeing what you want for your project and what the designer can do needs to be very specific. And what to say about the need and the doing experiments. It's easier to say that you would want an experiment on a project, but if you don't use it, you are not sure exactly what it means. So for a graphic designer, it might be very much easier to propose like a logo or a sticker. But if you want to do interface design, you need to be a tester for that organization. I don't know, have you interacted with designers in your projects or do you think that they understood the need or do you know what your target is? I mean, for a designer it's very important to understand the target. Can you, I don't know, use somebody, yeah? But does anyone really know the target for their open source project or how do you measure that? If you are not a user of this exactly open source project, you cannot contribute, which I agree, but not only, but in open source especially, you have to be user otherwise you can't. The design is more of a user centric, so you need to use to know what the context is and that's why maybe those people are particularly useful as you can design ideas. Yeah, that's true, but that's just one feedback. I just want to throw a couple of questions in one day, but if a designer can do trust in that project because he's not seen as an active member of the community. Okay, so the agreement there was that you can make a proposal if you use it and you become a user of that product so you have more trust and respect because you use the product. Okay. Yeah, but that means that the designer becomes a user and he's expressing his personal opinion. But his opinion might be wrong and you would need to test what he proposed with other users and here you can consider that the committers are part of the users, but that can also be biased. And yes, usability test could help to test with real users, but yeah. The problem with designing biased work. Engineers, okay. So Linux was what you would do. You needed to know what you were doing in order to just install it, right? And that's exactly what you would want to avoid having a designer or both like a designer have to be completely neutral and face the brother as you know, an external user. And actually you're outside of the user pool. Yeah. You need more objective. And actually this is the main reason why open source organizations want designers because they want somebody with expertise that could answer all their questions that they couldn't answer until then. And they rely on them to bring new ideas or to make the soft ads sellable as iPhone or Apple or stuff like that. Well, not everything is because you never analyze the data. They would never let you do that because like you don't understand anything about the user's place, the user's place. And becoming a user, even temporary, would build a credit and would make you understand the field. So, in a way, you also don't want to be quick. Okay, sure. But the main conclusion is that you need to invest time in this. So it might take you a while. It's not something like you deal the logo and then you can switch. In order to contribute to open source, it might take you a while. First, because most of the projects are a bit technical. And then is the communication part because this is very vital for any open source organization. But the communication might happen over IRC. And for the example, in the open source design community, we had a large debate of if we should use Slack or designers don't want to go to IRC or why don't we change. But the reality is that all the major open source projects, they're on IRC and you need to work with them. And this is not a big thing. It's like a limitation and you cannot do it. And then it comes the persuasion because even if you propose something, you need to convince that community that what you propose is good. And if you do like usability testing and you gather data, it's much easier to convince because you don't need to be persuasive. You just show the data. But otherwise, you will see very much resistance from open source project because they will consider it subjective. And especially the owners and the main commenters would not like it. How do you explain to them that what you propose is good or not? And the expertise, the reason might be enough or not for some organizations. Most of the users don't... We have like a form of usability form and nobody does that. And even with that, I mean, when gathering data and analyzing data, it's more on the direction of user research. And you might have a designer that wants to do interface and do the proposals and not necessarily see how it evolves over time. So either you try to attract an organization of multiple designers or you try to do a little bit of both or you just, I don't know, see it over time how it goes. I think it's quite interesting to point gathering data to, like, generally open source software that wants to gather any personal data, whatever usage laws it is. And that's something, like, the drug that I was working at. Like, that's very interesting. If you look at it the other way around, if you look at gathering data, it's something you don't quite hope to get. Like, by default, it's not there. But if there is a way to contribute to a project, you explicitly say, yes, I want to do that. Please put my name as contributor. I come part of the community as much as I can. The other thing I can is actually, like, well, they may do this usage pattern. So if it helps you to improve, well, maybe it's something we could actually do. I mean, that's a little different. Technically, it's the same for what's happened with our phones and everything in pervades or so. But from an epic perspective, it could be actually a way to contribute. It's like, those people could recognize from all the different types of guys that actually help. And some organizations do that when you start or you can anonymously send data about your usage. The issue is that usually big organizations do this. So if you're a small organization and you don't have people to analyze the data or even make the software integration to collect that data, there might be some problems. Okay, and regarding tools, this is a very long debate because some organizations expect from your open source designers to use design tools that are open and maybe, I don't know, they're used to using Sketch or Photoshop. I think this is a personal decision. As an open source organization, you cannot force or expect that from a designer, but what is expected from you is to provide whatever deliverables you have in an open format. So we had an example in the design community when somebody provided the Sketch file and after three months, the developer said, okay, I want it to see, but I don't know how to open it. What is this? And in the meanwhile, the designer got bored because he didn't receive the answer for three months and we needed to find another designer that has that soft which is paid and et cetera. And also, you should provide all the sources. I mean, some just like, because they're attracted to the open source hype and they want to do something for the other organization, but they just provide the PNG or let you ask for the other dimensions of the deliverables. Well, and productivity, it's really important because, okay, you have a designer who wants to contribute to your project and then he expects somebody to tell him what to do or what is needed without, I don't know, understanding the users. And in open source, the commuters needs to be proactive and so are the designers. So you need to investigate on your own what you think it's not working or what is working. And yeah, it depends on the mindset you have. This is not something that we can change because otherwise you influence the designer to provide the solution or... Another aspect is that some commuters, if they have a problem, they think they have the solution and maybe they want the designer just to make it more pretty. Usually, this doesn't work very good. I mean, the designer should investigate the problem and maybe propose another solution or maybe iterate on that. It depends. And one thing that if you have a designer, you need to tell them from the first moment what is the decision process because every organization has different voting systems. Some, if you are a partial way, so if somebody does a veto, you need to convince them and the vote freezes until all the core commuters agree. Either it's just the majority of votes that you can go forward or if there are not enough contributors, if you are available to do it, you just can do it without people complaining. But for example, Victoria gave the Apache Camel an example this morning and there the designer posted the proposal on Twitter and he got like 80 likes and he said there are 80 people in the world that like this design. Why don't you agree with it or why don't you want to have it in production? And the Apache was like, no, we have to sort the rules. But this was not very clear from the start. And the problem is that if you have just a particular committee that does the decisions, the results might not be very relevant. It might be faster but I guess you all know that sometimes for a feature you spend like three months to get an approval or to make it to production and for designers it's especially difficult because most of them don't have the technical ability to implement them. So they rely on people agreeing and people maybe getting excited of implementing them. So the time to wait for such a proposal to be implemented grows like, I don't know, five times over. And also tell them what is the minimal time to make a decision. I mean some organizations wait like 72 hours or I don't know like two weeks or depending on how many contributors they have and if they're a hobbyist. But for example also in our community there was a very nice proposal for a mustache framework. It was the redesign of the homepage. The proposal was submitted and after one year we also had somebody that did the PR so we also did the front end part and after one year the committers saw the PR I'm not sure. But in the meanwhile the designer forgot about this or didn't want to contribute anymore because he felt that his work was not appreciated or responded in time. And commitment is one of the main purposes of designers. I mean everybody would like the designers to be involved in their project and follow what they propose for multiple iterations and maybe do adaptations. So this would be very nice but as you said some designers just want to have multiple interests in portfolios and might be or not be interested in this part. And also if you stay long enough in that community they might expect you to provide a vision or to show them how your project can attract multiple users and this is some hard things to do for a designer or for developers or for any owner of a community and it's hard to decide. Because I'm late, do you have any questions? Because a lot of those tools are command line based and there are no focused designers focusing on design not from across. Design is focusing on design and command line and what happens is that we end up with every release we end up changing something major in that command line out with us. So is there something like that happening in the community? I'm not sure, I'm fine to take your question. So your tool is command line and you make changes to the options and the question was? The question is, is there something like this happening in the design community where it's command line designers are coming up? So you're asking if there are job posts for tools that are command line? I haven't seen one, as you said maybe they don't need that much design again. It depends what you want to test. If you do this ability test, yes you can do information architectures on that. You can decide if the items you list and the command lines are in the particular order or if some are more priority than others. So you can do this kind of thing, not necessarily visual design tweaks. Does it ever happen that an open source project is added by designer instead of being started by engineers and then the designers kind of you know, hearing on board late and not being able to influence on the decision and community process procedure because it sounds like... So the question was if it's started by designer or if the designer comes late because they're too... No, that's what's happening now. Designers have come late to the party and the impression I get from what you were describing is that it's really hard to have such an influence means the match that it's impossible to prevent actually... So the truth is that currently even in our opposite design community if I look at the most active members we are kind of mixed. So Victoria did computer science, I did computer science. We are able to start from a start project because we can also implement having a pure designer starting a project I didn't hear about. But that was not their main project so that was like a side project and the main developers are from Taiga so again, not necessarily what to request. It's ideas. The idea starts a project and doesn't make it usable it's still a black salt, you know what else how to use it. Except other contributors who start improving it. They're like starting a new engineering sense not a new regular design. So no one uses it, so then... No, no, no, no, no. It's done for the sake of engineering there's always an interface, a common line interface, API, whatever. It's still very easy because all the DNA is now how to use it. True, that's true. There are many products that are used by majors so distributed file systems are not like operating systems they don't have like a wide distribution. I think my point is in startups for instance in the start of the world the founders typically are not engineers and that's really interesting. I mean, a guy with an idea of a service or a product that later on in the process when they need an engineer to talk to the engineer, right? People think about that startup usually the problem is the startup. Well, they're not sure about the designers. We're not labeling maybe those are not there. At least they go found maybe later on in the process. I mean, I think there's quite a different problem with such products. Yeah, I think the question is like open source project what's the time at first to make the process start? Usually it's like you're giving an answer or what it is there you see that other people need it and so they'll know it and then can't start mainstream but you don't think about the open source project as something that you have to put in the market and be like shares and say about a lot of users but I think we're also talking about kind of a social aspect like both startup and open source project has this sense of movement or cultural phenomenon where people get together by the same culture or something shares their views and they push it through. What have you done? When we say open source we start understanding this social aspect or meaning this social aspect a lot. There's quite a pool actually when you push it through other areas okay so I'm sorry to interrupt but thank you so much for coming in after this track if you have time it's an interesting discussion