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Mission

We are a community of designers and developers pushing more open design processes and improving the design of open source and free software.

You can read more here

Open

We are an open community. Any conversation or decisions that impact the future of our community need to be available to as large a part of our community and the general public as possible.

What does that mean?

  1. Conversations that impact the community should not happen in invite-only spaces.
  2. content should be accessible (Preferably ADA accessible. ie. text to speech software should be able to parse it)
  3. As best as we can we should use software that follows Free, Libre, and Open definitions and standards.
  4. This doesn't apply to conversations that require a high level of trust and confidentiality. An example of this is breaches to our Code of Conduct. See how to do that in Reporting Violations.

Reaching Consensus

  • We're an organization of volunteers spread around the globe with as little hierarchy as possible.
  • We still want to be able to make decisions.
  • We want to encourage people to take initiative. This is hard if we don't have set rules for doing so.

Proposed Solution

We work well with GitHub. We know that it isn't an open tool, but it's a social network that is familiar and encourages wide participation, and is widely used by FOSS projects.

  • Minor changes to the website and organization will be maintained by github issues and pull requests.
  • Major organizational changes (logos, umbrella projects, etc) will have to go through a set process.

Before taking initiative, here's a useful checklist:

  1. Can you name the problem?
  2. Have you seen other people discuss it?
  3. Have you asked on our Discourse forum or on GitHub whether it's been discussed before?
  4. Can you personally see this through to the end?
  5. Can you find people who could offer opinions or feedback on your initiative? A good place to start is the people listed on the core e-mail address
  6. Do you think this is a major enough initiative that it would require community feedback?

Then, once you've identified the problem:

  1. Name the problem to the community.
  2. If the problem needs a approval from the wider community (eg, accept a project as an umbrella project) then we will put it to a vote after a certain amount (TODO: how long?) of discussion on it has happened. The vote will be open for two weeks. TODO: We need a list of THINGS THAT NEED COMMUNITY APPROVAL topics.
  3. If there is no clear aproval then a call for a volunteer committee will be put out. If during the consensus solution discussion someone steps forward to organize such a commitee priority will be given to that committee. Membership of the committee should be diverse and hold a wide variety of opinions.
  4. If no volunteer committee comes forward, and no consensus is reached, things will be put to a vote. The vote will be single transferable vote if that's appropriate (if there are multiple options). If it's a yes / no vote than a 51% majority will be needed.
  5. A committee can work on the process, but they're administration, not decision makers. Final decisions should still lay with the community

Community Aproval

Things that need community approval

Generally these are things that you feel uncomfortable deciding for the rest of the community. For example: Drastic design changes for the website Community logo What projects to have underneath the open source design umbrella of projects (front page projects) …

Things that don't need community approval

Adding content to the existing structures:

  • Adding people to the organization
  • Adding projects to the job board
  • Adding resources to the resources repository etc

We want to encourage people to take initiative. If someone thinks they can lead the charge on something they should do so after asking whether anyone else is already doing so. If no one answers within three days, you have a green light. If it involves a type of issue listed in THINGS THAT NEED APPROVAL, keep that in mind while working on it.

Code of Conduct

Every member of our community will abide by our code of conduct. You are a member of our community when you interact with our website, the github organization, our presence on other websites, and other members of our community.

Open Source Software and What We Use

We're a community that wants to push the use of open tools to make open source software better. One of our goals is spreading knowledge of open source and open source design.