| title | url | deadline | amount | currency | submitter |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Shuttleworth Fellowship |
2016-11-01 |
unspecified |
NA |
bnvk |
A description of the status quo and context in which you will be working (1500 chars)
The world is like that Gibson quote "the future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed". As a designer I primarily focus on user experiences and I see this "distribution problem" often a result of poorly designed interfaces and closed information systems that interfere and obstruct with progress of societies and individuals. People who interact with poorly designed systems are vulnerable to failure, misinformation, exploitation, and wasted time. I see humanity at a crossroads, one direction continues towards imbalance ruled by existing power structures, proprietary economics, and dominant capital reserves enforcing the "status quo". I see these structures benefiting from unorganized poorly designed interfaces and closed systems as both make it easier for centralized bodies to exert power - a misinformed public (with many below the poverty line) are likelier to make poor choices as they can't afford usable tools. However, it's also a post-WikiLeaks world, which to me means an awareness of new approaches - embodying and leveraging radical transparency and openess. While the parameters and implementation of radical transparency vary from context to context, the implications and possibilities of creating a more fair, egalitarian, sustainable, and a just world are ripe. Whether it is with governments, companies, groups, software projects, or private lives - the fulcrums of tranparency, privacy, and usability play a pivotal role in the implications of technology.
A description of what you want to change about the status quo, in the world, your personal vision for this area (1500 chars)
I want to substantially raise the bar of bringing great interface and user experience design, as well as usability to multiple existing free and open source projects. I want to help improve these projects in terms of attractiveness and user friendliness so that these projects become viable alternatives to their proprietary closed counterparts in the Apple ecosystem. The values driving this goal is to provide more privacy, availability, and education to more people in the world. The privacy offered by free software is privacy from government and corporate surveillance. The availaiblity offered by open source is that in terms of cost and affordablness as open source usually free to use and share. Lastly, the mentorship and education offered by free and open source communities due to the participitory nature of open source is tremendously better than the virutally non-existent mentorship in proprietary eco-systems. A factor that is crucial to the success of this effort will be to stay focused on making free software usable and accessible for people that are not traditionally associated with its userbase - white males who are good with computers. Instead I plan to focus on making free software easier to use, get support for, and contribute to for new demographics thus also attracting them to use it and reap the benefits and intrinsic values offered by openess.
Describe the innovations or questions you would like to explore during the fellowship year (1500 chars)
A skilled designer can create renderings and UX improvements for an existing app or mockup for a new one in a matter of days or weeks. However, new designs can take months or years to turn into functioning stable software. Implementation time is governed by how many engineers (and their skill level) work on a project. This is in turn governed by the amount of funding available. Most free software projects do not have designers on the team; many never have design contributions at all. For projects appealing to a niche of technical users, this is fine. But for projects aiming towards mass adoption it's essential to have good design. Another problem with projects which lack design, but have a surplus of engineering, is that they end up with too many features integrated unintuitively. Free software evolved from computer science and engineering disciplines where designers were scarce, which resulted in talented designers avoiding free software as it was unattractive or misunderstood. Yet, business-minded Silicon Valley realized good branding and marketing made people discover and use software, while good usable interfaces kept people using said software. Venture capitalists have benefited tremendously by paying attention to this. I believe by contributing the right amount of design help, to the right projects desiring this help, spread out over the right amount of time will shift this equilibrium. Exploring these optimums will be a consistant, documented and open process.
A description of what you actually plan to do during the year (1500 chars)
In 2014 me and other designers started the Open Source Design community. Initially we pooled resources and spoke at events, then came a GitHub organization, an IRC room, a website, and original branding. We have been iterating on an open "job board" that brings together designers and programmers. Our job board has facilitated logos, wireframes, styleguides, and other design related work for free and open source projects. Some jobs have paid, but many are done out of love, including building the community itself. However, to truly raise the bar of free software usability and compete with proprietary offerings, growth is needed. I see the next logical step being an addition to the Open Source Design community - a component which functions like a design agency offering multiple services: a traditional advertising agency, a UX agency, a usability testing lab, and issue tracking. First, we will create bylaws for this agency and determine required legal entities for handling financial compensations as well as methods to keep track of non-monentary contributions. Next will be developing, documenting, and publishing criteria for accepting projects into the agency. Following that will be establishing relationships with suitable projects. This should all be done within two months. Beyond that, we will start working with these projects towards improving whatever design work is most needed. This will continue to be experimented, tested, and shared with the open community.
1500 chars
In the model outlined above (once agency bylaws, legal entities, and project criteria are established) offering consistent sustainable work on projects over long time periods to make progress will be a hurdle. Thus, it's paramount the agency functions in a financially sustainable fashion for both the designers contributing to projects as well as the core developers maintaining projects. The linchpin to this will be working with projects that realize and embrace sustainable funding and revenue models. Open source projects that refuse to introduce money will have to receive gratis contributions from Open Source Design Agency designers. I suspect finding the right projects with the right revenue/funding models (or helping projects bootstrap these models), and matching that with user demand to be the biggest challenge the agency faces. One factor which will certainly affect the financial options available to projects will be the licensing of the core codebase and dependency codebases. Another hurdle will be the unexpected emergent complexities of implementing new features or improvements that occur during the software development process. Since the root goal is offering software to end users that remains stable and improves beyond beta, 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 releases, making all these components function in harmony such that the operation will be financially sustainable beyond the Shuttleworth Fellowship lifecycle will be something to keep experimenting, testing, and iterating on.
Openess is at the very core and will permeate throughout the entire scope of work I plan to do creating and running the Open Source Design Agency. Openess will exist in terms of licensing of any design resources or content created while working on projects. This includes things like icons, fonts, templates, styleguides, and themes. Openess will exist in terms of sharing and cross-pollinating UX research and patterns generated as designers work towards improving the usability of differing and similar open source applications. All research will be published under open licenses. Running the organization itself will also be done in an entirely open fashion in order to offer insight, transparency, equity, and equality about our operations and motivations. I plan to freely license and package data about the success and progress of projects using OKFN's data packages format. Examples of this will be hours worked, budgets allocated, hiring and contracting, as well as ongoing project planning and management. I want to attact top-tier design talent to the OSD Agency and better integrate them into the free and open source software world while allowing them to make still make a living. I see offering radical transparency and openess to be an attractive virtue that will appeal to many frustrated with the status quo of traditional agencies, NDAs, budgets, salaries, and contracts all negotiated behind closed doors.
Since 2013 I have worked full time on numerous open source projects as well as contributing to others for gratis. As I established above, before choosing projects I need to collaboratively establish a proper criteria as a prerequisite to choosing partner projects. The following is a list of exciting and promising projects that I have tested, used, contributed to or chatted with. In the desktop space, I see improving the documentation and presentation of the Debian ecosystem (which powers so many projects) to be significantly helpful. While Elementary OS is perhaps the most design-led and beautiful Linux distro at present, security-focused operating systems like Qubes OS and Subgraph, both of which I have relationships with are also relevant to consider. As for desktop applications – with ThunderBird being sunset by Mozilla, email programs Mailpile and Subgraph Mail are crucial. Encrypted chat applications like Coy IM might be a good candidate. Design programs like Inkscape and password manager KeePassX are also valuable offerings. In the mobile space, Copperhead OS (which is a fork of Android focusing on stability and security) shows much promise in terms of stability. Open mapping apps PocketMaps and OsmAnd are essential. Signal, ChatSecure and Conversations are promising contenders in the open secure messaging space. While the F-Droid store is making significant progress and is crucial to an open mobile ecosystem. Web applications like OpenStreetMap, Ethercalc, Etherpad, Nextcloud and Mailpile are viable contenders against the Google counterparts. In supporting the open data ecosystem I am a huge fan and have contributed to the Open Knowledge data package eco-system. For the last year and half have I worked on TransparencyToolkit which is creating open source tools for investigative journalism which might be relevant. Lastly, applications or protocols like the distributed file syncing project Syncthing and cryptocurrency Bitcoin are very promising and relevant as they currently function on all platforms with numerous implementations. Lastly, open hardware creators like Purism laptops, the unPlug device, and the PGP NitroKey are all clear cut physical products that are open source and have wide userbases when marketed correctly.