 Hi everyone, I hope you are having a great mess right now This is actually my first mess and I'm super excited to be presenting at a conference for the first time So a little about me I'm Anushka and I'm reaching in town with Fedora Working on improving the Fedora Docs experience. I like to describe myself as living an ingenious life in a designer's shoe Because I am a self-proclaimed designer There is a big question Which sometimes I want to answer or seek an answer for Why I decided to continue to open source, being a designer So open source software has inspired great engineers to build novel abstractions It is also a platform to connect with people all over the world Apart from tech skills, we also get to learn about different cultures and communities Understanding how huge organizations such as Fedora maintain consistency in their design Some contributors all across the globe is something that has interested me a lot And I also want to learn and advocate for open source design So through outreachy, I found a platform to get into open source For the longest time I've watched my peers at college getting to GSOC and put their summers away I never heard of designers pursuing a career in open source And felt that it didn't belong here So I believe this internship is also unique because I'm working on a user experience based project Among the countless programming based ones My project is actually involved with improving the Fedora Docs experience But today I don't want to talk exactly about what I am working on That you might be able to learn about in a while But I want to talk about this How as a designer, it is intimidating to begin contributing in open source So I'll start with a small story Basically, I remember asking my project mentor if he could create an issue on the cracker Since we needed that in our final application for outreachy He did that but here's the catch He also told us to create a full request of our proposed solution Now you can see my solution has, in the contribution phase, I made my solution in a sigma file And it had a lot of screenshots and a lot of viewpoints from my site On how we can improve the Fedora Docs But basically, since we weren't altering any code lines There wasn't anything to push So making a full request was stated I also remember fellow contributors initially changing lines in the read me to contribute To create a PR with their ideas Think about that Also another issue with the method was that Fedora pageant doesn't support linking images in the put request And it's really difficult to explain the design process and the decisions Without relevant images to make a case As you can see in this screenshot, I have a lot of images in my contribution So basically there was no plain sailing way to document and share the design suggestions And ideas for the project and a lot of contributors were going through the same phase I also made a sick jam presentation with all my ideas, design decisions I was laid out in a week-wise format But converting everything from the presentation to text was quite cumbersome for me When I draw this up with my mentor, he agreed that we could attach a link to the design files Where we made all the marks instead of opening a pull request And we could direct the project contributors and maintain us to those things But to think about that, you can also understand that this is merely a fix, not a solution to the existing problem So what I want to say is there still isn't a standard way for designers to showcase their work in progress Developers can actually rely on systems for version control and documentation Like on websites like GitHub, GitLab or Fedora Future As a designer, I have to manually input the entire change log Also, design is something that cannot be measured in zeros and ones It's not like for design, a pull request is merged or not merged It doesn't work that way And also, while working on any issue, we either have to put links in the discussion Quorum and IRC charts and there is no record, as in the case of developers having the entire work embedded in just a pull request I have created some discussion threads in Fedora Rescussion On which I have received immense response from the community But still I've seen somehow that for designers, it is a secondary thing that they work getting the required documentation and recognition Also, I've found that my tool of choice is different from the one that Fedora design team uses in the workflow This is not a case of one but many, as each force in contributing to open source is different So might be their tools And for better or worse, we care about the tools we use Since I have been designing in Sigma since the contribution to it There are a lot of iterations on my Sigma file Replicating which will be a cumbersome and productive task for me Also, I couldn't copy the entire Sigma file to Fedora The tool that Fedora is using today So basically collaboration becomes a little tricky with incompatible design files Sometimes I feel OSS has such a developer-forward environment that many impactful contributions are left tangled among the tech constraints It also needs to be addressed that the needs of designers and developers are different And a one-crit all solution couldn't work in this environment We need tools and systems accessible to more than just people who work Even today, brainstorming and collaboration with designers is not as efficient as in the case of developers I also feel that designers have a little different definition for open source than developers Designers also want to make meaningful contributions for the benefit of all But I can see that many proprietary companies like Google and Crid have released open source design kits And are advocates of open design But how do they bring such contributors and resources under one umbrella and use them meaningful It's something that I want you all to ponder about Anyway, you might be thinking why should I care about design or usability? One of the main reasons most computer software is so abysmal is that it's not designed at all But mainly ingenuity An example of this being the Fedora docs website itself It has grown organically over the years Another reason is that implementers often place more emphasis on a program's internal construction than on its external design despite the fact that as much as 75% of the code in a modern program deals with the interface to the user This was told by Mitchell Kappard in his software design manifesto It was published in 1991 I also found that There are 13 installation configuration guides in the Fedora docs website The need for extensive help in installation, configuration, routine maintenance or system functions continues to make the work of data processing highly meaningful But no one is speaking of the code user I want to ask you all What do you think stands as the future of design and open source? Because designers today are really not close to open source culture It is most probably because of the education that they are being trained for is corporate workforce People pursue credits and getting credits for non-code contributions is hard Open source needs advocates for usability and user-centric design I have seen this for a few many times while preparing this talk that we need a GitHub of the future for designers So what could be your solution? How can open source report contributions in design? It is very hard for UX designers to get attribution for their work because UX designers are mutually collaborative process where everybody feels related GitHub has revolutionized software development for millions of people I feel that the advent of no-code tools in the coming decade open source would look less like code and more like software design Think about that Everybody can hear the desire if the community is exposed to the right combination of tools people and distribution What can we learn from the open source movement of the yesterday decade and how can design transition from hands of a few to many? This is something I want you all to think about and if you have any questions or suggestions you can reach out to me at my Fedora ID like Anushka Thank you so much