Difficulties in having more designers involved in Open Source
Moraru, Ecaterina
Open discussion about getting more designers participating in Open Source projects and better understanding of the barriers that may be preventing them from contributing. We will invite several designers into the panel, to share their experience with their open source communities and provide insight on the topic. Some questions will be interactive and the public can also vote and respond, representing their opinion.
 No, no, no, don't worry. Okay, so. Yes, yeah, I don't know what to put. Can we use this? What's the developer's side and which one is the. Okay, so dark one is the developer. And the white ones are the designers. Okay, great. I'm going to take one too. Okay. Yes, yes, yes. Okay. Just I want to introduce the interaction part. Okay, so we will have some introductory questions just to know the audience and you can use the the short link if you want to vote from your phone or you can scan it with the QR code and it's important to know from the room. How many designers there are and how many developers there are to know the representative and while you do this and get the survey we're going to introduce ourselves. So my name is the cat in a more and I'm an interaction designer for about 10 years for an open source project, which is the key. Okay, and I'm going to. Hi, so I'm Timon. I'm actually in like computer games, mostly right now. But before that, I did some work for iOS as well. That was more. I was a programmer, but you know, there's a little bit of design in all programming work. Nice. I'm Belen. I am an interaction designer and design researcher. I've been doing these for over a decade now and I've been contributing to free software for about seven years now. I'm young. I'm also an interaction designer, mostly on the next cloud and also some other smaller open source projects. Hi, I'm Donald Abrams past 18 months. I've been I worked in vision on studio doing the animation tools right now. I'm working for the O. K. Moe Foundation's community manager. Yes, this is going to be the hardest part of moving the microphone. Okay, so I'm going to update this. Okay, okay. So we have like 14 developers, six designers and some other people, which is interesting because it's interesting. Being a designer room, we have some good representations just shy developers that will vote mostly from their phones. Okay, the next question is if you have a designer in your project community and I would like maybe the panel members to say if they have multiple designers in their community. And if they work for multiple communities. Well, so like I said, I'm mostly on the corporate side, kind of computer games are appropriate. I so I can save much for open source. And most of the projects open source projects I'm involved in. No, no, designers. Mostly because it's like the graphics kind of things. So but there are company. Basically everybody's responsible for his like we have my my my extras. So if you're a like if you're the sound guy, you're the sound guy, you do everything that is sound related and you have to work with other people to make all of that work. But there's no, you know, person who's responsible for the design on the UI side, even we very often have people responsible for certain parts of the UI. But it's not always necessarily a person who is responsible for designing all of the way and then a separate person responsible for making the UI usually it's kind of connected because we have a small team. In every single open source project I've contributed to have been the only designer. Yeah, I would say in every open source project, I'm in I'm the only like designer with a design education or a design studies background, so to say, but there's a bunch of front end people or even like I would say more and more front end people who are also more design minded, which is good to see, of course, or yeah, developers who also get more and more design minded. At Envision, we definitely had a lot of designers on staff because but it's interesting, they're designing for designers. And they had a lot of power they basically to make product owners to a large degree. And then at OCaml Foundation, we very, very small. We're actually contracting our design right now for the bits that we needed and we're looking at what more we need. Okay, and for for my case in XRK for the past 10 years, I've been the only designer to so that's why we actually we did this community in order to not be alone anymore and to get feedback. Yeah, the project says, okay, so this is quite a calibrated. I'm curious to see if we will ever do a panel if this changes over time and if we have more and more designers involved. Okay, the next question is what communities do you think they need designers and okay, are they small, medium popular or they're optional? We are small and I guess 12 people. What I would say is in our company and our general ideas that we just don't have the resources to have a specific designer. Not so much because a person who's designing is not doing work in a way. Not that really, but the problem is that also creates more work in the sense of like more overhead to get a result. If you just have a programmer doing the programming and he just says, oh, I'm going to do this and then just does it. That's very quick. So we have a very short iteration process because of that. Whereas when you're designing, you have to first design, you have to think of all of the use cases, you have to then implement them and the end result probably will be much better, but it takes longer to get there. So what are the other projects that have like one or two people that are doing and like your idea and would you think you would like a designer or sizes better on that? Well, in my case, I've worked in both streams. I contributed to the Yachter project, which is Sanyo's Foundation initiative and there was a massive project. I was still the only designer and in that case, the designer was considered optional, right? I was disposable. But I also worked in a one man bands like the video, the video program that they use here at Fostom to process all the talks. And that's a one person project. And in that case, I felt very much valued and, you know, that he was really appreciated my work, the maintainer. So I think I'm not sure size, what is the factor here? Yeah, I guess the most true answer, I guess that most people unfortunately would give us D, but what is the correct answer is a. So the especially because a lot of proprietary projects are Silicon Valley projects or whatever are co-founded or led by designers, which unfortunately brings us in a tight spot because we have to compete with that basically. So, yeah, that's very important that we look at this a not just as like, oh, we have so few resources and I hope that the jobs board of open sources and can help with that to solve these small tasks or do it in small steps. So I have a more nuanced thought on this. So design is kind of an overloaded term. A lot of times the degree programs are called visual communications for a reason because it's another form of communication. So really you bring a designer in once it surpasses your average person's ability to communicate what's happening. So if you're doing like a blockchain startup and it's a small people, those things are very, very difficult to both communicate and understand. And they're going to be designer much earlier than something that's more well understood by the people you're communicating to. So again, it's doesn't really the size of the project is more about the complexity of what you need to communicate because you need an expert to notice how to whittle it down and balance both copy and visual design. Or interactive design in a lot of your cases. Yes, yes. So the results are medium projects. So people maybe consider that you need to be a sizable team in order to need someone dedicated for this kind of work. Maybe there are also financial reasons for this voting. Okay, this is more like a marketing slide. But the idea is if you are looking for a designer as a no-possessor contributor, where would you go to look for one? And the option D is like our open source design job board where we try to reach the gap. But yeah, I don't know if you want to say anything besides this. And I don't know how many had the time to vote to vote. But the majority say other. I'm curious what that other means, but and maybe I have some bugs in the. Okay, so this means just paid designers, not necessarily somebody that could volunteer and do it for free. Okay, and the question is what kind of designer do you need for your project? And this would be interesting to know how you vote because there's also lack of education in the vast areas of design. And I don't know when people looking for a designer, if they know exactly what they want and designers expect you to have the jargon and know exactly what you're requesting. Do you have any remarks about this? I guess the issue is and maybe Belen can or Bernard also can say more about this, but I guess that user researcher, for example, is not going to be really answered by anyone or it's not really something that you think about because it's not something that you see that you think that you need. Whereas graphic designer if you say, oh, we need a logo or we need some illustrations. Yeah, that's obvious. But it's not obvious that you need a user researcher or a usability engineer. Also very quickly mentioned that these are roles, not people. I do several of those things, for example. So these are roles, not much directly to people necessarily. And another issue is that I put there the front end developer and a lot of communities, they expect someone to do also the implementation. But in our community, we usually we don't know to do that part and also the projects are very diverse and in a lot of languages. So we might not feel that that need. And I'm curious what people said. Okay, so there are eight people that said that they don't know. Yes. Wait. So my question is, since I answered, I don't know. It's partly because I'm not sure what's the difference between some of those roles. Could you explain what's the difference between interaction designer, usability engineer and UX designer? I want to explain this. I can try. A lot of it has to do with where in the funnel it is. And so you have people that are trying to find out more about your users, which are your researchers. All the way. And there's a different piece of the funnel all the way down to the front end developer, which is actually making it real. And there's different specialties that are broken down inside. I actually don't know of any good resources on that explain the difference between each one. And actually, there's a lot of arguments in the design community. What when you're putting out for a role, what do you title it because these things are all very different. I'm going to be fairly brutal in here. I'm going to say that out of all those things, a graphic designer tend to be a different person. A front end developer tends to be a different person. Everything else is what, what did you call it? Slang. It's the same thing. But we are an industry, I think that tend to make up fancy words. Very separate as well. Actually, I think it's a core element of the interaction design discipline. The statistics in the math part. The statistics in the math part. So actually usability engineers very often will not do statistically significant studies anyway. It also depends on the person. So some are more generalized and they as Balan said, they want to do all, but some they are specialized and they, I don't know, they do just accessibility or. And the next question is for how long would you need a designer and the options are one time periodic full time and issue based. And this is important when you want to contribute with collaborate with somebody because that person might have a limited time or if you want them to stay like a couple of years, you might need to find them in some ways. Any remark. So, I should for me right now, I actually need a one time, but very specifically, I want to deliver with a small design system. So when they're putting other pieces, allow me to sort of remix it with some guidelines and that enables me to not mean necessarily need the periodic. So the list of votes we have for one time. So people who want some kind of long term involvement of the designer in the project. I think that's super important. You have been 10 years in next week. I was five years in Dr. Project. I think establishing long term collaborations is actually key. Now there was going to be very efficient to work you do the amount of interaction you have to do to get into the project. You do kind of have to understand it first before you can actually do any work. And also depend on the project. I mean, it's a platform and it's very complex and you still have work to do for a longer period of time. But if it's just a logo design, you cannot stay for a long time. You just dropped the logo. Yeah, yeah, no, sure. OK, yes. Yeah, I am one of the other people. So not the designer and my theater director. And I wanted to make a short statement on the political task of open source design because for me we were four people working together from the beginning to people more coming from design side and to developers. And I think in a lot of software, the mainstream people are using what they see is very different to what's happening on the technical side. And I think for me it's a really, really in political issue to create design, to create a design that enlightens people about how the architecture is working actually because we need to make more people aware of how technical stuff is happening. And it is mostly a design issue. And that's really a statement. So please talk from the beginning on, get people in there. And I didn't know anything about the developing process and I had to learn a lot. But then we had big discussions and I said, no, I don't want to have hierarchical software architecture. And then there were a lot of good ideas because we started in the beginning. And that's like, I think the political issue that's really unclear for a lot of people that there's like an enlightenment that can happen so people can understand how things are working if it's like more transparent to the architecture. Cool. Thanks. Okay. And this question asks, does your community list the design contribution rules? Do you want to comment something about the options? No. So we have options like the design issues list. How many of you do you have this? I mean, I will see when the results are come. But it's very important to showcase and list them in the issue tracker is the most easiest because every developer are using them constantly. But if you as a designer coming through a community and you don't know exactly what is needed, there's no way to find it. Yeah. So what is often missing I guess in projects is a, or what is often there in projects and open source projects is some kind of contribution page. So how to get involved as a developer, as a translator, whatever else as a writer or something or marketing. But what is often missing is design. Even if it's there, it's mostly maybe just a link or something. And what would be really good is to have some kind of dedicated like slash design page for a project where you really have like specific things like like almost everything like that like design issues list. Decision makers feedback conduct deliverables communication channels. And yeah, this is also something that we should maybe list or review on other projects where we say, hey, we prior or prioritize projects, which actually have a page like that and allow people to be onboard or make it easier for people to onboard themselves. I was actually kind of interested to hear more about how do you guys usually keep the documentation for design, because the format in which you keep the documentation will, I think, decide a lot how you can how people can contribute right. So any thoughts? Yes, just coming out of the industry, there's a lot of work on design systems and being able to sort of hand them off. And I think it's still relatively in its infancy. We have like three or four big competitors, but in terms of we don't have a standard deliverable format. I think we have a principle behind it, which is like the Brad Frost and atomic design for web and app. But that doesn't even really touch interactive that well. So it's it's it's happening, but I think it's still in its infancy. So like handing it off as a deliverable and we're just not there yet. It's just text design documents basically. You can hear it off a DSM system, but you're locking them into the system. So the next question is that if you think that money is a factor for limited contribution in OS and there was a tweet that somebody said that most designers are in compensated at level that encourages contributions. And I'm just going to update to see what you said. And it's true. Does anyone want to comment about money? I mean, it's a distinct and delicate topic, but I wanted to slide about it because maybe have different opinions. Hi, my name is Dave Crossland and I've worked for many years on Libre Fonts type. So I'm Dave Crossland. I work for many years on Libre Fonts and Libre font design type based design is a very specialist area of design graphic design in general. It requires a long time to practice to be able to do it well. And often people have to invest tens of thousands of euros in university courses to get to that level. They're very often very against the idea that they would give away work that they worked for months or years on full time. Nevertheless, there are a lot of Libre Fonts which are out there, not only from Google, but also from other companies where they've seen that it's more valuable for them to make the font available under a Libre license than to restrict it. And so I think that the tweet is interesting that most designers are not compensated at a general level compared to software engineers. But a lot of designers are working in very small studios or freelance compared to software engineers. And if you understand the business value propositions of free licensing, then potentially you can earn good money doing open design. The next question. No. So this is a double session. So please relax because I have like 10 more questions. The next question is if you think that the university or industry influences the tools and format that designers use. If you want to say something about that. Absolutely working in vision. We definitely worked very strongly with a lot of those programs to seed it in early. And maybe everyone has a student license for a reason. It's to get to lock them in early. And it's just a great way to get my share super early. Yeah, I was just recently at a design university and it was a bit strange how the students are like all the hot shit like, oh, did you hear about Framer and I mean, in vision and figma and whatever that's already old. And the new stuff is like, yeah, always the latest things and I was just, yeah, okay, so you learn a new tool like every year or whatever. And it's, I mean, I would say it definitely influences it. I would also say it's a pity that that necessarily happens. Yeah, that there's no kind of standard that that stays there because I personally think that pen and paper is still or or or whiteboard or something is really valuable to us for collaboration. I'm going to blame the university is in here like I'm a PhD candidate in the design school at Northumbria University and basically what they provide to their students is that obvious stuff. I think they something needs to change in the mindset of educators as well. And but I don't know how that's going to happen. And there was also a case when somebody requested design and contributor give them a sketch file and the developers said I cannot see that I don't have the tools or what you're going to do and using open formats like SVG and exporting them. It should be easy for for everyone. Okay, so the next question is, do you need to be a user first in order to contribute? Anyone has an opinion on this? So let's see some results. Okay, they're kind of the equal. No, no. So, so I have a I have a tweet. It says that pretty much all open source contributors start out as users which limit the number of projects that the designer by reasonable expected to want to contribute to. I mean, if let's say designer might use the tools, they might want to contribute to game for escape. But besides this, they would need to contribute to projects that they haven't used before. So I work a bit with both with design and development. So what? Okay, I work with a little bit of both. Okay, so I work with a bit of both design and development. But so the question is like how do designers actually pick projects that they would like to work on? Because like as a developer, it's either your skillset or like a project that you're attached to, but then you're attached to the project there, not the skillset. So how do designers go about building their preferences? Okay, so as Jan said, maybe they will pick a project because it has that list of design issues or they have a read me and it will be easy for them to to job on board. Otherwise, I don't know, maybe money. If that project can propose some I wouldn't necessarily say that you have to be a user first is always good to be user. But as a designer, you should have some sort of ability to step into people's shoes, which is the quality that you should have as a designer or do research and really find out what what the users do. Oftentimes, being a user doesn't help but is actually counterproductive because you're you're too much actually in your own workflows and think too much about the way you use the software yourself. So sometimes really happens to step a long way back. I mean, I often do that also with the project that I work on and really helps after like one week of really not looking at it at all. Then you're like, oh, this is absolute bullshit. And then you change it. So that really helps. Yeah, I think it doesn't really matter that much if you are a user first, but I think you definitely needs to need to become a user after it. So once you get involved and they start contributing, you have to understand the software and it's important that you use it as well. I just think it's really important to balance the needs of like a first time early user and a power user, people that come in as a user first and they're sort of optimizing their experiences are really designing for a power user in case and requires expertise to step back and really sit there and design for the first time user. And we did to we had to envision we had two different cycles for this we had internal tickets that we generate because we would use it for own stuff. And then we'd have the external ones that we would go and talk to users or people are using out in the street and that they're having the two cycles really helped. Also, if you spend a lot of time designing a project, you will need to do usability tests to see the how first interactions do so you cannot do it yourself, but you need users at least to do it. Okay, so the next question is the designer need to learn get and Bell and do you have something. You don't know. So I was at this at this university, as I said, and oh, okay, yeah. So feel free to punch me but no, they should not. And I mean, I do know get and I would say it's it's a good probably but it shouldn't be. And like it starts at the level because those students, for example, I showed them get up desktop, for example, which is a non terminal interface for get. But still the design itself and the wording like clone push and pull is totally bonkers like it should be first of all, it should be automatic, or it should be called upload download it should be called save or something like that. It's like these basic things you kind of expect, you know, yeah. And from the developer here, I'm going to say that developers need to learn how to use get first. We've all have a ton of problems, whether it be a small merge commits, like conflict resolution like we don't know how to do it. So I beyond compare charges 100 bucks to get a license is because it's hard. There are a bunch of design version control systems currently being developed. Avacoat I think is one of them is a bunch of others. Different system in terms of you have people use do things visually and it's a lot of times it is also different version control for copies in terms of going through approval processes and different pieces. It's a different system than code. No, I don't think they should learn how to do just get unless they're expected to be coding HTML along with you all in that case. And I have to learn to use one of the two GUIs hopefully that's well designed. Well, I did want to say, yeah, of course get this back to basis of everything and you have to learn it. How are you going to cooperate with the developer? No, no, that's I mean it depends on the format in which you have your date. It's true that if it's more graphical, if it's more like a wiki style thing where you need to make comments for things, get just wouldn't make sense. The merge conflicts would be horrible. On the other hand, so for example, get design wise is the problem with it is that it's very poorly explained to people, but it's actually very easy. You just have to think of a tree of patches. It's just a tree of patches and then all of the commands modify that tree and simple. Can I say something very quickly? I don't think they have to, but they definitely shoot. Git is an amazing tool. And it's also because when you're for me, what happened was that when I learned Git, I wasn't really learning about Git. I wasn't even learning about version control. I was learning about design as my design material and that was really powerful. So I think they should they don't have to. And there's also a tweet at the bottom who says that most open source development happens on GitHub and it should be great to see that platform expands to support designs. My question is, so many people here answer true designer needs to learn Git. I would like to ask why designers need to learn Git. I understand that they have to understand the versioning system and that's why does it enhance the collaboration between designer and developers. So it's a question for developers. Because maybe when we create a project with image icon icon with different size, if you can't modify it, it has to be the developer to modify this. It will be more comfortable for the designer to modify. Your saying is going to be faster if a designer does it. Okay. Sorry, thank you. I wanted to say a quick note about this. And I think that this is two questions implicitly into one. One is whether we use Git as a specific set of technologies to do version control. And if designers should use that specific tool, another one that is very different and is being answered as well is whether there should be some version control for the overall design. So we can track back to changes and relate to that as different user experiences. I think that may shed some light on this. So on the technology side, we have a law called Conway's law that we use for demand or design. It's basically your system ends up looking like your communication structure. And so the question is how are you communicating between your designer and developer? If that communication is happening with HTML and CSS, then that needs to feature branches and so on, then they need to learn Git because that's how they need to collaborate. And I've had that at places I've worked with, such as Craftsy and Vision. But if your handoff point is further off where you have front-end developers that are expected to take changes and mockups and get updates and then turn that into HTML and CSS and that's your handoff point, then no, they don't need to learn it. So it really depends on what your communication substrate is and how you design your organization. So the next is a remark and it says that design is not perceived as valuable as code. And people said 13 votes for true and 9 for false. Any comments on that? If not, we go to the next question. Straight up comment. If you have an ugly design, people are going to tell you about it much faster than that ugly hack you just wrote. It kind of depends on who looks at your code, but yeah. I guess it can sometimes be perceived, but then you use some crappy software and you immediately appreciate the value of good design. Thank you. I have a bit of a side question for the panel on this. And it may have something to do with the answers to this question. Where do you believe the ideation process fits into the software development lifecycle? And that's a question across the board because I think that might answer a lot of the reasons. So what exactly do you mean? When should we start the design or where does design fit within that process? Okay. So the answer is if the primary is the software development lifecycle, where does the design and design is a cycle just as a single point in and out? Where does that fit into the overall work? And if I say like it's in the beginning and then you just repeat? That's what I would. Okay. So that would be my answer. I mean, the answer by the book, of course, is at the very beginning. Who does that, you know, like, or where does that happen in practice? Is the, especially in open source software, rarely or never? One, I, or it's, this is a different point, I would say, specific to this, to this thing, the value ability is that, for example, on GitHub, because we talked about get before, they have this like punch card thingy, right? This calendar of contributions and the problem there is that they count commits, they count issue opens, they count per request. Don't count anything else. What I do mostly is comments on issues like design feedback. They do not count this at all. So, I mean, I also do open issues and I also do commit, but if I wouldn't do that, I would be invisible. So this is basically, I mean, as GitHub says on the front page, built for developers. So that's like the first mistake that has made. The, this is interesting. The answer by the book is at the beginning, I actually think the ideation process, it should be happening all across because the idea you're going to be learning, you're learning all the time through the process of designing and developing. So that should feed into ideation. That doesn't mean that specific stages do my focus more on that than on building, for example, or whatever. But I think it should be there all along. I think it's a very wide pipeline in a lot of ways. So, I mean, in the end, the first thing you have to know is everything about your user you can. What are their goals? What is this going to achieve for them? You have a person as a product specialist who's listening to a user researcher determine what the most opportunity is doing a ton of math with BAs to figure out what looks like. And if you're open source project and it's a project of passion, you're like, okay, does this achieve the goal better than all the other options? And that takes a lot of time and effort and energy. Sometimes you'll choose a design because it's easier to communicate. And that requires basically sketching out what the visual design is going down to sketching and different pieces. It's an incredibly variable depending on what product you're building, what your users are, how complex it is. If you have a marketplace versus a single use app, what's going on here? So it's not a single standard way to integrate design in organization. But it's definitely an important piece for every piece to understand the value of. And again, it really depends on what you say design is. Just from experience, I can say for me, it was always from the very beginning forever constantly. Basically, I always as a programmer, I'm constantly designing actually the software and that includes both the like the 12 person team writing computer games and my single person projects at home that I do. It's always constantly thinking, oh, I could do maybe this better or maybe I could do and then I just write down the idea and then later on I try to read through some of the things I wrote down and work on them. Anything else? I'll change the question. Okay. Okay, so the next question is as a contributor, have you ever felt technically shamed? By myself all the time. Why did I write this? So stupid. Oh, that was me again. I think that's something developers do. I've seen that answer. You know, I've seen this in so many developers. I don't really feel shame. I can say, oh, gee, I did this wrong, but I don't really I'm ashamed about it. We call it blaming, but we don't really think of it as that. Teaching is hard and like learning is basically getting used to embarrassment and just moving forward with it. Having a culture that supports basically feeling shamed and getting better and like using that to move forward and not make you feel like you need to stay in your lane and hide is a different environment. And I think it's important to design organization so that identifying when the shame is and then saying, okay, well, if you're going to call me on this, you need to teach it to me. And let's sit down and actually get over this because we can't have this happen over and over again because that's where that's where the organization should be ashamed. The thing is that it also depends on the project. So if you're a beginner designer and you might propose something that is outrageous and the developer might say, no, this is will never be implemented. So how did you not know that this is not implementable and can be a bit down for designer because he will lose confidence in him. But I don't say that we should always say that, oh, that's nice and that's beautiful. But yeah, and this applies not only for designers, but also for new contributors. So one thing for new contributors always check first whether what you're going to try to do actually makes sense. So just ask what needs doing like if you come to a project and you say, oh, I made this complete brand new design that for your project is going to be great. Everybody is going to look at you. Why? Just a comment on this. But as you mentioned also, the open source community is very focused on kind of technical elitism and you know you will recognize by your contribution. And I know that from I wasn't for them some years ago, and there was a similar discussion with people working on documentation and translation that are another kind of contribution. And it's very hard to enter a community and very hard to be recognized if you're not developer basically. And so putting some insights or in some way to show that the value that a designer, someone who works on documentation can provide to a community. I think it's very important and shifting a little bit the focus on developers and developing and code only to something more broad user experience is something that is probably in my in my opinion something that should be valued and probably be pushed in some way. There's just one thing I want to add to that as a developer. If you can write use cases for me if you can like basically make my work easier in any way that's ridiculous. You appreciate it. You cannot imagine the amount like it won't always show maybe but it really usually is very appreciate if you do any kind of work that organizes work for me in a way. So if it makes my work more efficient, more organized, more clear what the issue is even just going over issues in the backtracker and asking users what, you know, what's the actual problem here or why is this not working. What's your system stuff like that hugely helps. Okay, so the next question is, should open store designers have an engineering background. For me, I have an engineer I have a master in software engineering. And instead of coding, I decided to do interaction design. And it was helpful. Because I know how to commit and to develop and understand but background I mean, yes, yes, like. I can say no, but definitely not. And I also think that designers don't need to have an academic design background. You know, sometimes you learn on the job sometimes you know, I think the academic background is somehow irrelevant. It's useful if you're trying to communicate with engineers. So if you're designing open source tools for engineers, I mean, you're going to, that's basically user research you have. I was also going to say most. So I definitely agree with the academic part. You don't need academics. Sometimes even bad for you. Not really. But yeah. But no, like learning in practice on projects is always better than five minutes. I lost my foot. Sorry. I did want to say that yeah, usually it is good to have the background so that you know whether your ideas are easier to implement or not. Because if you can come up with a great design that is just unfeasible to implement and then it's kind of wasted effort. Hello everyone. For this question and for the previous one, a question came to my mind. Actually, I heard always the communication between designers and developers, but why we don't talk about analysts. For example, for use case diagrams or flaws, they can be also from an engineering background. And I think that the analyst position would be so helpful for such projects. And so my question is in general, are there also analysts for your during your projects or you communicate directly to the developers? Thank you. So again, depends on the size of the project. If they have an analyst that would it's already a big project and some of the analyst work is done by the interaction designers or. At the place we had the most successful product I've ever seen, we actually used to get them out of BA. So BA would do a lot of the sales talk and the number crunching. And then we would transition the ones usually with humanities backgrounds into product and design work. And we had extreme success with them. They were literally the best I've ever worked with in my career. Can you explain BA? Business analyst, sorry. Okay, next question is, would you trust the designer to make the best decision for your project? And there is a tweet from Nelson who says that since the merit system in project is based on contribution, why would you trust this new and unknown person to start making decisions about how the thing should work? So any comments on that? Definitely depends on the designer. If he has a background in engineering. No, mostly about whether I think they are. Seriously, though, I would say the design speaks for itself always. So it doesn't matter who it is. If the arguments are there for why this design is good, then sure. But it has to be merit based. It cannot be, oh, I like this new, I don't know, the material design. And I think it's the best thing ever. So we're now going to switch everything to material design that doesn't just useless basically. It's a fashion statement. I think it's kind of ridiculous to think you can even upfront know what the best decision is. All you can do is make an informed decision and designers are more than capable of making a well informed decision. I would say, especially since Andreas, the person who wrote the tweet as a designer also might be like a devil's advocate question. So I don't think he thinks that it's correct or proper that there's a merit system in open source software. Yeah, I don't know what his actual opinion is. I think trust needs to be earned. So you are a designer, you need to earn the trust of the community and they maybe they'll believe that George is the best decision. Okay, the next statement is that everyone has an opinion on design. And there's also a tweet commenting that it's really is really hard getting buying from project maintainers. It could take six plus months back and forth to get the logo designed. Any questions? From my side, I always I also always have opinions, but I always try to hold them back if they are just opinions. So you have to always think of the bigger project and the whole user base, not just your own use case. I think my other get the elephant is awesome. If you guys haven't heard about the elephant thing, it's you know the wise men with like one person touching the trunk and it's like, oh, it's a snake one person something the leg. So it's a tree. I know other places you can touch a very different experience. But in the end, it's a way that you know what it is is by everyone having a piece of it. So if you have something that serves more than one kind of user, they're going to each have a lens into it. So for example, like, there's lots of stuff out there not designed for me. So I guess I everyone has an opinion, but mostly it's their lens that they have their experience in. I mean, I would definitely say everyone has an opinion design, but it depends how you put them into words and how you argue them and how you back them with research or with with results or not results, but yeah, research or only research, I guess user testing and stuff, how it's how they how they then end up in the project or how you get value out of them because anyone can say anything. And it cannot be informed by any anything that makes sense. But if you actually do testing and research, which unfortunately is not often thought about, then you can actually do that. Just wait for the Twitter ratio. Okay, next question is with a like summary, but what do you think is the greatest attribute and always designer should have. And we're going to see other results and comment on that. Okay, so communication skill. I would have expected. I think you're always limited by what you're worse at. Do you think there is there any correlation between gender and noise participation. And I have some stats there that in UK, it's a step from 2014 70% of design students are female and participation open source of women is 3%. And also if you look in the room and the contributors in our small community, there are more many more females than 3% is a lot. I think. Just being kind of honest about it right now. Yeah, I also have some stats and like this been a study couple of years ago where they found out that a code done by women code done by women is approved or the higher eight than men, unless the gender is known. And if the gender is knowledge just goes downhill from there. So, and to think that this issue is not systematic is just like turn a blind eye into that. So there's definitely a correlation and we kind of know why that is. Also speaking about the numbers as far as I know that general participation in the developer community of women is about 12 or 14% something like this. So 3% yeah. Of course, but yeah, but 3% seems lower than general industry. So fine. Six, five depends on again. We're ranging one to 11%, but not higher than that, depending on the community in developer like general development, not open source is 25% max. So that's already a big difference, but 3% is more close to the to the total open source participants. I mean, those results we have to wonder which jobs that they, you know, count in those statistics. I actually don't. I mean, we definitely have huge salary gaps still power gaps. I mean, you see different like even when they fix the pay ratio, then I say they fix the bonus ratio or how much percentage get promoted. You see in computer science, especially has the most basically you have people leaving the field that are women and minority at a higher pace than your like I coming in. So you actually have a survival rate that drops that says that there's a reason they're leaving. What that is, there's a lot of research there. A lot of it is bad environments and bad systems. Making sure that when you design your community and you open source product in your governance to make sure that this is comfortable. And if you're like me, which is a white male American, you look go. Okay. If I want this person, you should be what do they need to feel safe, valued and honestly can afford to go and afford to participate. And those are going to be different answers depending on what country you're talking about what gender and what you look like. So thank you so much for participating and for answering it for the questions. So, yes, thank you.
 No, no, no, don't worry.  Okay, so.  Yes, yeah, I don't know what to put.  Can we use this? What's the developer's side and which one is the.  Okay, so dark one is the developer.  And the white ones are the designers.  Okay, great. I'm going to take one too.  Okay.  Yes, yes, yes.  Okay.  Just I want to introduce the interaction part.  Okay, so we will have some introductory questions just to know the audience and you can use the the short link if you want to vote from your phone or you can scan it with the QR code and it's important to know from the room.  How many designers there are and how many developers there are to know the representative and while you do this and get the survey we're going to introduce ourselves.  So my name is the cat in a more and I'm an interaction designer for about 10 years for an open source project, which is the key. Okay, and I'm going to.  Hi, so I'm Timon. I'm actually in like computer games, mostly right now.  But before that, I did some work for iOS as well.  That was more. I was a programmer, but you know, there's a little bit of design in all programming work.  Nice.  I'm Belen. I am an interaction designer and design researcher. I've been doing these for over a decade now and I've been contributing to free software for about seven years now.  I'm young. I'm also an interaction designer, mostly on the next cloud and also some other smaller open source projects.  Hi, I'm Donald Abrams past 18 months. I've been I worked in vision on studio doing the animation tools right now. I'm working for the O. K. Moe Foundation's community manager.  Yes, this is going to be the hardest part of moving the microphone. Okay, so I'm going to update this.  Okay, okay. So we have like 14 developers, six designers and some other people, which is interesting because it's interesting.  Being a designer room, we have some good representations just shy developers that will vote mostly from their phones.  Okay, the next question is if you have a designer in your project community and I would like maybe the panel members to say if they have multiple designers in their community.  And if they work for multiple communities.  Well, so like I said, I'm mostly on the corporate side, kind of computer games are appropriate. I so I can save much for open source.  And most of the projects open source projects I'm involved in.  No, no, designers.  Mostly because it's like the graphics kind of things. So but there are company.  Basically everybody's responsible for his like we have my my my extras.  So if you're a like if you're the sound guy, you're the sound guy, you do everything that is sound related and you have to work with other people to make all of that work.  But there's no, you know, person who's responsible for the design on the UI side, even we very often have people responsible for certain parts of the UI.  But it's not always necessarily a person who is responsible for designing all of the way and then a separate person responsible for making the UI usually it's kind of connected because we have a small team.  In every single open source project I've contributed to have been the only designer.  Yeah, I would say in every open source project, I'm in I'm the only like designer with a design education or a design studies background, so to say, but there's a bunch of front end people or even like I would say more and more front end people who are also more  design minded, which is good to see, of course, or yeah, developers who also get more and more design minded.  At Envision, we definitely had a lot of designers on staff because but it's interesting, they're designing for designers.  And they had a lot of power they basically to make product owners to a large degree. And then at OCaml Foundation, we very, very small.  We're actually contracting our design right now for the bits that we needed and we're looking at what more we need.  Okay, and for for my case in XRK for the past 10 years, I've been the only designer to so that's why we actually we did this community in order to not be alone anymore and to get feedback.  Yeah, the project says, okay, so this is quite a calibrated. I'm curious to see if we will ever do a panel if this changes over time and if we have more and more designers involved.  Okay, the next question is what communities do you think they need designers and okay, are they small, medium popular or they're optional?  We are small and I guess 12 people.  What I would say is in our company and our general ideas that we just don't have the resources to have a specific designer.  Not so much because a person who's designing is not doing work in a way.  Not that really, but the problem is that also creates more work in the sense of like more overhead to get a result.  If you just have a programmer doing the programming and he just says, oh, I'm going to do this and then just does it.  That's very quick. So we have a very short iteration process because of that.  Whereas when you're designing, you have to first design, you have to think of all of the use cases, you have to then implement them and the end result probably will be much better, but it takes longer to get there.  So what are the other projects that have like one or two people that are doing and like your idea and would you think you would like a designer or sizes better on that?  Well, in my case, I've worked in both streams.  I contributed to the Yachter project, which is Sanyo's Foundation initiative and there was a massive project.  I was still the only designer and in that case, the designer was considered optional, right?  I was disposable.  But I also worked in a one man bands like the video, the video program that they use here at Fostom to process all the talks.  And that's a one person project.  And in that case, I felt very much valued and, you know, that he was really appreciated my work, the maintainer.  So I think I'm not sure size, what is the factor here?  Yeah, I guess the most true answer, I guess that most people unfortunately would give us D, but what is the correct answer is a.  So the especially because a lot of proprietary projects are Silicon Valley projects or whatever are co-founded or led by designers, which unfortunately brings us in a tight spot because we have to compete with that basically.  So, yeah, that's very important that we look at this a not just as like, oh, we have so few resources and I hope that the jobs board of open sources and can help with that to solve these small tasks or do it in small steps.  So I have a more nuanced thought on this.  So design is kind of an overloaded term.  A lot of times the degree programs are called visual communications for a reason because it's another form of communication.  So really you bring a designer in once it surpasses your average person's ability to communicate what's happening.  So if you're doing like a blockchain startup and it's a small people, those things are very, very difficult to both communicate and understand.  And they're going to be designer much earlier than something that's more well understood by the people you're communicating to.  So again, it's doesn't really the size of the project is more about the complexity of what you need to communicate because you need an expert to notice how to whittle it down and balance both copy and visual design.  Or interactive design in a lot of your cases.  Yes, yes.  So the results are medium projects.  So people maybe consider that you need to be a sizable team in order to need someone dedicated for this kind of work.  Maybe there are also financial reasons for this voting.  Okay, this is more like a marketing slide.  But the idea is if you are looking for a designer as a no-possessor contributor, where would you go to look for one?  And the option D is like our open source design job board where we try to reach the gap.  But yeah, I don't know if you want to say anything besides this.  And I don't know how many had the time to vote to vote.  But the majority say other.  I'm curious what that other means, but and maybe I have some bugs in the.  Okay, so this means just paid designers, not necessarily somebody that could volunteer and do it for free.  Okay, and the question is what kind of designer do you need for your project?  And this would be interesting to know how you vote because there's also lack of education in the vast areas of design.  And I don't know when people looking for a designer, if they know exactly what they want and designers expect you to have the jargon and know exactly what you're requesting.  Do you have any remarks about this?  I guess the issue is and maybe Belen can or Bernard also can say more about this, but I guess that user researcher, for example, is not going to be really answered by anyone or it's not really something that you think about because it's not something that you see that you think that you need.  Whereas graphic designer if you say, oh, we need a logo or we need some illustrations. Yeah, that's obvious.  But it's not obvious that you need a user researcher or a usability engineer.  Also very quickly mentioned that these are roles, not people.  I do several of those things, for example.  So these are roles, not much directly to people necessarily.  And another issue is that I put there the front end developer and a lot of communities, they expect someone to do also the implementation.  But in our community, we usually we don't know to do that part and also the projects are very diverse and in a lot of languages.  So we might not feel that that need.  And I'm curious what people said.  Okay, so there are eight people that said that they don't know.  Yes.  Wait.  So my question is, since I answered, I don't know.  It's partly because I'm not sure what's the difference between some of those roles. Could you explain what's the difference between interaction designer, usability engineer and UX designer?  I want to explain this.  I can try. A lot of it has to do with where in the funnel it is. And so you have people that are trying to find out more about your users, which are your researchers.  All the way. And there's a different piece of the funnel all the way down to the front end developer, which is actually making it real.  And there's different specialties that are broken down inside.  I actually don't know of any good resources on that explain the difference between each one.  And actually, there's a lot of arguments in the design community. What when you're putting out for a role, what do you title it because these things are all very different.  I'm going to be fairly brutal in here. I'm going to say that out of all those things, a graphic designer tend to be a different person.  A front end developer tends to be a different person. Everything else is what, what did you call it?  Slang.  It's the same thing. But we are an industry, I think that tend to make up fancy words.  Very separate as well.  Actually, I think it's a core element of the interaction design discipline.  The statistics in the math part.  The statistics in the math part.  So actually usability engineers very often will not do statistically significant studies anyway.  It also depends on the person. So some are more generalized and they as Balan said, they want to do all, but some they are specialized and they, I don't know, they do just accessibility or.  And the next question is for how long would you need a designer and the options are one time periodic full time and issue based.  And this is important when you want to contribute with collaborate with somebody because that person might have a limited time or if you want them to stay like a couple of years, you might need to find them in some ways.  Any remark.  So, I should for me right now, I actually need a one time, but very specifically, I want to deliver with a small design system.  So when they're putting other pieces, allow me to sort of remix it with some guidelines and that enables me to not mean necessarily need the periodic.  So the list of votes we have for one time.  So people who want some kind of long term involvement of the designer in the project.  I think that's super important. You have been 10 years in next week. I was five years in Dr. Project. I think establishing long term collaborations is actually key.  Now there was going to be very efficient to work you do the amount of interaction you have to do to get into the project. You do kind of have to understand it first before you can actually do any work.  And also depend on the project. I mean, it's a platform and it's very complex and you still have work to do for a longer period of time.  But if it's just a logo design, you cannot stay for a long time.  You just dropped the logo.  Yeah, yeah, no, sure.  OK, yes.  Yeah, I am one of the other people. So not the designer and my theater director.  And I wanted to make a short statement on the political task of open source design because for me we were four people working together from the beginning to people more coming from design side and to developers.  And I think in a lot of software, the mainstream people are using what they see is very different to what's happening on the technical side.  And I think for me it's a really, really in political issue to create design, to create a design that enlightens people about how the architecture is working actually because we need to make more people aware of how technical stuff is happening.  And it is mostly a design issue. And that's really a statement.  So please talk from the beginning on, get people in there.  And I didn't know anything about the developing process and I had to learn a lot.  But then we had big discussions and I said, no, I don't want to have hierarchical software architecture.  And then there were a lot of good ideas because we started in the beginning.  And that's like, I think the political issue that's really unclear for a lot of people that there's like an enlightenment that can happen so people can understand how things are working if it's like more transparent to the architecture.  Cool. Thanks.  Okay. And this question asks, does your community list the design contribution rules?  Do you want to comment something about the options?  No.  So we have options like the design issues list. How many of you do you have this? I mean, I will see when the results are come.  But it's very important to showcase and list them in the issue tracker is the most easiest because every developer are using them constantly.  But if you as a designer coming through a community and you don't know exactly what is needed, there's no way to find it.  Yeah. So what is often missing I guess in projects is a, or what is often there in projects and open source projects is some kind of contribution page.  So how to get involved as a developer, as a translator, whatever else as a writer or something or marketing.  But what is often missing is design. Even if it's there, it's mostly maybe just a link or something.  And what would be really good is to have some kind of dedicated like slash design page for a project where you really have like specific things like like almost everything like that like design issues list.  Decision makers feedback conduct deliverables communication channels.  And yeah, this is also something that we should maybe list or review on other projects where we say, hey, we prior or prioritize projects, which actually have a page like that and allow people to be onboard or make it easier for people to onboard themselves.  I was actually kind of interested to hear more about how do you guys usually keep the documentation for design, because the format in which you keep the documentation will, I think, decide a lot how you can how people can contribute right.  So any thoughts?  Yes, just coming out of the industry, there's a lot of work on design systems and being able to sort of hand them off. And I think it's still relatively in its infancy. We have like three or four big competitors, but in terms of we don't have a standard deliverable format.  I think we have a principle behind it, which is like the Brad Frost and atomic design for web and app. But that doesn't even really touch interactive that well.  So it's it's it's happening, but I think it's still in its infancy. So like handing it off as a deliverable and we're just not there yet.  It's just text design documents basically.  You can hear it off a DSM system, but you're locking them into the system.  So the next question is that if you think that money is a factor for limited contribution in OS and there was a tweet that somebody said that most designers are in compensated at level that encourages contributions.  And I'm just going to update to see what you said. And it's true.  Does anyone want to comment about money? I mean, it's a distinct and delicate topic, but I wanted to slide about it because maybe have different opinions.  Hi, my name is Dave Crossland and I've worked for many years on Libre Fonts type.  So I'm Dave Crossland. I work for many years on Libre Fonts and Libre font design type based design is a very specialist area of design graphic design in general.  It requires a long time to practice to be able to do it well.  And often people have to invest tens of thousands of euros in university courses to get to that level.  They're very often very against the idea that they would give away work that they worked for months or years on full time.  Nevertheless, there are a lot of Libre Fonts which are out there, not only from Google, but also from other companies where they've seen that it's more valuable for them to make the font available under a Libre license than to restrict it.  And so I think that the tweet is interesting that most designers are not compensated at a general level compared to software engineers.  But a lot of designers are working in very small studios or freelance compared to software engineers.  And if you understand the business value propositions of free licensing, then potentially you can earn good money doing open design.  The next question. No.  So this is a double session. So please relax because I have like 10 more questions.  The next question is if you think that the university or industry influences the tools and format that designers use.  If you want to say something about that.  Absolutely working in vision. We definitely worked very strongly with a lot of those programs to seed it in early.  And maybe everyone has a student license for a reason. It's to get to lock them in early.  And it's just a great way to get my share super early.  Yeah, I was just recently at a design university and it was a bit strange how the students are like all the hot shit like, oh, did you hear about Framer and I mean, in vision and figma and whatever that's already old.  And the new stuff is like, yeah, always the latest things and I was just, yeah, okay, so you learn a new tool like every year or whatever.  And it's, I mean, I would say it definitely influences it. I would also say it's a pity that that necessarily happens.  Yeah, that there's no kind of standard that that stays there because I personally think that pen and paper is still or or or whiteboard or something is really valuable to us for collaboration.  I'm going to blame the university is in here like I'm a PhD candidate in the design school at Northumbria University and basically what they provide to their students is that obvious stuff.  I think they something needs to change in the mindset of educators as well.  And but I don't know how that's going to happen.  And there was also a case when somebody requested design and contributor give them a sketch file and the developers said I cannot see that I don't have the tools or what you're going to do and using open formats like SVG and exporting them.  It should be easy for for everyone.  Okay, so the next question is, do you need to be a user first in order to contribute?  Anyone has an opinion on this?  So let's see some results.  Okay, they're kind of the equal.  No, no.  So, so I have a I have a tweet.  It says that pretty much all open source contributors start out as users which limit the number of projects that the designer by reasonable expected to want to contribute to.  I mean, if let's say designer might use the tools, they might want to contribute to game for escape.  But besides this, they would need to contribute to projects that they haven't used before.  So I work a bit with both with design and development.  So what? Okay, I work with a little bit of both.  Okay, so I work with a bit of both design and development.  But so the question is like how do designers actually pick projects that they would like to work on?  Because like as a developer, it's either your skillset or like a project that you're attached to, but then you're attached to the project there, not the skillset.  So how do designers go about building their preferences?  Okay, so as Jan said, maybe they will pick a project because it has that list of design issues or they have a read me and it will be easy for them to to job on board.  Otherwise, I don't know, maybe money.  If that project can propose some I wouldn't necessarily say that you have to be a user first is always good to be user.  But as a designer, you should have some sort of ability to step into people's shoes, which is the quality that you should have as a designer or do research and really find out what what the users do.  Oftentimes, being a user doesn't help but is actually counterproductive because you're you're too much actually in your own workflows and think too much about the way you use the software yourself.  So sometimes really happens to step a long way back.  I mean, I often do that also with the project that I work on and really helps after like one week of really not looking at it at all.  Then you're like, oh, this is absolute bullshit.  And then you change it.  So that really helps.  Yeah, I think it doesn't really matter that much if you are a user first, but I think you definitely needs to need to become a user after it.  So once you get involved and they start contributing, you have to understand the software and it's important that you use it as well.  I just think it's really important to balance the needs of like a first time early user and a power user, people that come in as a user first and they're sort of optimizing their experiences are really designing for a power user in case and requires expertise to step back and really sit there and design for the first time user.  And we did to we had to envision we had two different cycles for this we had internal tickets that we generate because we would use it for own stuff.  And then we'd have the external ones that we would go and talk to users or people are using out in the street and that they're having the two cycles really helped.  Also, if you spend a lot of time designing a project, you will need to do usability tests to see the how first interactions do so you cannot do it yourself, but you need users at least to do it.  Okay, so the next question is the designer need to learn get and Bell and do you have something.  You don't know.  So I was at this at this university, as I said, and oh, okay, yeah.  So feel free to punch me but no, they should not. And I mean, I do know get and I would say it's it's a good probably but it shouldn't be.  And like it starts at the level because those students, for example, I showed them get up desktop, for example, which is a non terminal interface for get.  But still the design itself and the wording like clone push and pull is totally bonkers like it should be first of all, it should be automatic, or it should be called upload download it should be called save or something like that.  It's like these basic things you kind of expect, you know, yeah.  And from the developer here, I'm going to say that developers need to learn how to use get first. We've all have a ton of problems, whether it be a small merge commits, like conflict resolution like we don't know how to do it.  So I beyond compare charges 100 bucks to get a license is because it's hard.  There are a bunch of design version control systems currently being developed.  Avacoat I think is one of them is a bunch of others.  Different system in terms of you have people use do things visually and it's a lot of times it is also different version control for copies in terms of going through approval processes and different pieces.  It's a different system than code. No, I don't think they should learn how to do just get unless they're expected to be coding HTML along with you all in that case.  And I have to learn to use one of the two GUIs hopefully that's well designed.  Well, I did want to say, yeah, of course get this back to basis of everything and you have to learn it.  How are you going to cooperate with the developer?  No, no, that's I mean it depends on the format in which you have your date.  It's true that if it's more graphical, if it's more like a wiki style thing where you need to make comments for things, get just wouldn't make sense.  The merge conflicts would be horrible.  On the other hand, so for example, get design wise is the problem with it is that it's very poorly explained to people, but it's actually very easy.  You just have to think of a tree of patches.  It's just a tree of patches and then all of the commands modify that tree and simple.  Can I say something very quickly?  I don't think they have to, but they definitely shoot.  Git is an amazing tool.  And it's also because when you're for me, what happened was that when I learned Git, I wasn't really learning about Git.  I wasn't even learning about version control.  I was learning about design as my design material and that was really powerful.  So I think they should they don't have to.  And there's also a tweet at the bottom who says that most open source development happens on GitHub and it should be great to see that platform expands to support designs.  My question is, so many people here answer true designer needs to learn Git.  I would like to ask why designers need to learn Git.  I understand that they have to understand the versioning system and that's why does it enhance the collaboration between designer and developers.  So it's a question for developers.  Because maybe when we create a project with image icon icon with different size, if you can't modify it, it has to be the developer to modify this.  It will be more comfortable for the designer to modify.  Your saying is going to be faster if a designer does it.  Okay.  Sorry, thank you.  I wanted to say a quick note about this.  And I think that this is two questions implicitly into one.  One is whether we use Git as a specific set of technologies to do version control.  And if designers should use that specific tool, another one that is very different and is being answered as well is whether there should be some version control for the overall design.  So we can track back to changes and relate to that as different user experiences.  I think that may shed some light on this.  So on the technology side, we have a law called Conway's law that we use for demand or design.  It's basically your system ends up looking like your communication structure.  And so the question is how are you communicating between your designer and developer?  If that communication is happening with HTML and CSS, then that needs to feature branches and so on, then they need to learn Git because that's how they need to collaborate.  And I've had that at places I've worked with, such as Craftsy and Vision.  But if your handoff point is further off where you have front-end developers that are expected to take changes and mockups and get updates and then turn that into HTML and CSS and that's your handoff point, then no, they don't need to learn it.  So it really depends on what your communication substrate is and how you design your organization.  So the next is a remark and it says that design is not perceived as valuable as code.  And people said 13 votes for true and 9 for false.  Any comments on that?  If not, we go to the next question.  Straight up comment.  If you have an ugly design, people are going to tell you about it much faster than that ugly hack you just wrote.  It kind of depends on who looks at your code, but yeah.  I guess it can sometimes be perceived, but then you use some crappy software and you immediately appreciate the value of good design.  Thank you.  I have a bit of a side question for the panel on this.  And it may have something to do with the answers to this question.  Where do you believe the ideation process fits into the software development lifecycle?  And that's a question across the board because I think that might answer a lot of the reasons.  So what exactly do you mean?  When should we start the design or where does design fit within that process?  Okay.  So the answer is if the primary is the software development lifecycle, where does the design and design is a cycle just as a single point in and out?  Where does that fit into the overall work?  And if I say like it's in the beginning and then you just repeat?  That's what I would.  Okay.  So that would be my answer.  I mean, the answer by the book, of course, is at the very beginning.  Who does that, you know, like, or where does that happen in practice?  Is the, especially in open source software, rarely or never?  One, I, or it's, this is a different point, I would say, specific to this, to this thing, the value ability is that, for example, on GitHub, because we talked about get before, they have this like punch card thingy, right?  This calendar of contributions and the problem there is that they count commits, they count issue opens, they count per request.  Don't count anything else.  What I do mostly is comments on issues like design feedback.  They do not count this at all.  So, I mean, I also do open issues and I also do commit, but if I wouldn't do that, I would be invisible.  So this is basically, I mean, as GitHub says on the front page, built for developers.  So that's like the first mistake that has made.  The, this is interesting.  The answer by the book is at the beginning, I actually think the ideation process, it should be happening all across because the idea you're going to be learning, you're learning all the time through the process of designing and developing.  So that should feed into ideation. That doesn't mean that specific stages do my focus more on that than on building, for example, or whatever.  But I think it should be there all along.  I think it's a very wide pipeline in a lot of ways.  So, I mean, in the end, the first thing you have to know is everything about your user you can.  What are their goals?  What is this going to achieve for them?  You have a person as a product specialist who's listening to a user researcher determine what the most opportunity is doing a ton of math with BAs to figure out what looks like.  And if you're open source project and it's a project of passion, you're like, okay, does this achieve the goal better than all the other options?  And that takes a lot of time and effort and energy.  Sometimes you'll choose a design because it's easier to communicate.  And that requires basically sketching out what the visual design is going down to sketching and different pieces.  It's an incredibly variable depending on what product you're building, what your users are, how complex it is.  If you have a marketplace versus a single use app, what's going on here?  So it's not a single standard way to integrate design in organization.  But it's definitely an important piece for every piece to understand the value of.  And again, it really depends on what you say design is.  Just from experience, I can say for me, it was always from the very beginning forever constantly.  Basically, I always as a programmer, I'm constantly designing actually the software and that includes both the like the 12 person team writing computer games and my single person projects at home that I do.  It's always constantly thinking, oh, I could do maybe this better or maybe I could do and then I just write down the idea and then later on I try to read through some of the things I wrote down and work on them.  Anything else? I'll change the question.  Okay.  Okay, so the next question is as a contributor, have you ever felt technically shamed?  By myself all the time.  Why did I write this?  So stupid. Oh, that was me again.  I think that's something developers do. I've seen that answer.  You know, I've seen this in so many developers.  I don't really feel shame.  I can say, oh, gee, I did this wrong, but I don't really I'm ashamed about it.  We call it blaming, but we don't really think of it as that.  Teaching is hard and like learning is basically getting used to embarrassment and just moving forward with it.  Having a culture that supports basically feeling shamed and getting better and like using that to move forward and not make you feel like you need to stay in your lane and hide is a different environment.  And I think it's important to design organization so that identifying when the shame is and then saying, okay, well, if you're going to call me on this, you need to teach it to me.  And let's sit down and actually get over this because we can't have this happen over and over again because that's where that's where the organization should be ashamed.  The thing is that it also depends on the project. So if you're a beginner designer and you might propose something that is outrageous and the developer might say, no, this is will never be implemented.  So how did you not know that this is not implementable and can be a bit down for designer because he will lose confidence in him.  But I don't say that we should always say that, oh, that's nice and that's beautiful. But yeah, and this applies not only for designers, but also for new contributors.  So one thing for new contributors always check first whether what you're going to try to do actually makes sense. So just ask what needs doing like if you come to a project and you say, oh, I made this complete brand new design that for your project is going to be great.  Everybody is going to look at you. Why?  Just a comment on this. But as you mentioned also, the open source community is very focused on kind of technical elitism and you know you will recognize by your contribution.  And I know that from I wasn't for them some years ago, and there was a similar discussion with people working on documentation and translation that are another kind of contribution.  And it's very hard to enter a community and very hard to be recognized if you're not developer basically.  And so putting some insights or in some way to show that the value that a designer, someone who works on documentation can provide to a community.  I think it's very important and shifting a little bit the focus on developers and developing and code only to something more broad user experience is something that is probably in my in my opinion something that should be valued and probably be pushed in some way.  There's just one thing I want to add to that as a developer. If you can write use cases for me if you can like basically make my work easier in any way that's ridiculous.  You appreciate it. You cannot imagine the amount like it won't always show maybe but it really usually is very appreciate if you do any kind of work that organizes work for me in a way.  So if it makes my work more efficient, more organized, more clear what the issue is even just going over issues in the backtracker and asking users what, you know, what's the actual problem here or why is this not working.  What's your system stuff like that hugely helps.  Okay, so the next question is, should open store designers have an engineering background.  For me, I have an engineer I have a master in software engineering. And instead of coding, I decided to do interaction design. And it was helpful.  Because I know how to commit and to develop and understand but background I mean, yes, yes, like.  I can say no, but definitely not. And I also think that designers don't need to have an academic design background. You know, sometimes you learn on the job sometimes you know, I think the academic background is somehow irrelevant.  It's useful if you're trying to communicate with engineers. So if you're designing open source tools for engineers, I mean, you're going to, that's basically user research you have.  I was also going to say most. So I definitely agree with the academic part. You don't need academics. Sometimes even bad for you.  Not really. But yeah. But no, like learning in practice on projects is always better than five minutes.  I lost my foot. Sorry. I did want to say that yeah, usually it is good to have the background so that you know whether your ideas are easier to implement or not.  Because if you can come up with a great design that is just unfeasible to implement and then it's kind of wasted effort.  Hello everyone. For this question and for the previous one, a question came to my mind.  Actually, I heard always the communication between designers and developers, but why we don't talk about analysts.  For example, for use case diagrams or flaws, they can be also from an engineering background.  And I think that the analyst position would be so helpful for such projects.  And so my question is in general, are there also analysts for your during your projects or you communicate directly to the developers?  Thank you.  So again, depends on the size of the project. If they have an analyst that would it's already a big project and some of the analyst work is done by the interaction designers or.  At the place we had the most successful product I've ever seen, we actually used to get them out of BA.  So BA would do a lot of the sales talk and the number crunching.  And then we would transition the ones usually with humanities backgrounds into product and design work.  And we had extreme success with them. They were literally the best I've ever worked with in my career.  Can you explain BA?  Business analyst, sorry.  Okay, next question is, would you trust the designer to make the best decision for your project?  And there is a tweet from Nelson who says that since the merit system in project is based on contribution, why would you trust this new and unknown person to start making decisions about how the thing should work?  So any comments on that?  Definitely depends on the designer.  If he has a background in engineering.  No, mostly about whether I think they are.  Seriously, though, I would say the design speaks for itself always.  So it doesn't matter who it is.  If the arguments are there for why this design is good, then sure.  But it has to be merit based.  It cannot be, oh, I like this new, I don't know, the material design.  And I think it's the best thing ever. So we're now going to switch everything to material design that doesn't just useless basically.  It's a fashion statement.  I think it's kind of ridiculous to think you can even upfront know what the best decision is.  All you can do is make an informed decision and designers are more than capable of making a well informed decision.  I would say, especially since Andreas, the person who wrote the tweet as a designer also might be like a devil's advocate question.  So I don't think he thinks that it's correct or proper that there's a merit system in open source software.  Yeah, I don't know what his actual opinion is.  I think trust needs to be earned.  So you are a designer, you need to earn the trust of the community and they maybe they'll believe that George is the best decision.  Okay, the next statement is that everyone has an opinion on design.  And there's also a tweet commenting that it's really is really hard getting buying from project maintainers.  It could take six plus months back and forth to get the logo designed.  Any questions?  From my side, I always I also always have opinions, but I always try to hold them back if they are just opinions.  So you have to always think of the bigger project and the whole user base, not just your own use case.  I think my other get the elephant is awesome.  If you guys haven't heard about the elephant thing, it's you know the wise men with like one person touching the trunk and it's like, oh, it's a snake one person something the leg.  So it's a tree.  I know other places you can touch a very different experience.  But in the end, it's a way that you know what it is is by everyone having a piece of it.  So if you have something that serves more than one kind of user, they're going to each have a lens into it.  So for example, like, there's lots of stuff out there not designed for me.  So I guess I everyone has an opinion, but mostly it's their lens that they have their experience in.  I mean, I would definitely say everyone has an opinion design, but it depends how you put them into words and how you argue them and how you back them with research or with with results or not results, but yeah, research or  only research, I guess user testing and stuff, how it's how they how they then end up in the project or how you get value out of them because anyone can say anything.  And it cannot be informed by any anything that makes sense.  But if you actually do testing and research, which unfortunately is not often thought about, then you can actually do that.  Just wait for the Twitter ratio.  Okay, next question is with a like summary, but what do you think is the greatest attribute and always designer should have.  And we're going to see other results and comment on that.  Okay, so communication skill.  I would have expected.  I think you're always limited by what you're worse at.  Do you think there is there any correlation between gender and noise participation.  And I have some stats there that in UK, it's a step from 2014 70% of design students are female and participation open source of women is 3%.  And also if you look in the room and the contributors in our small community, there are more many more females than 3% is a lot.  I think.  Just being kind of honest about it right now.  Yeah, I also have some stats and like this been a study couple of years ago where they found out that a code done by women code done by women is approved or the higher eight than men, unless the gender is known.  And if the gender is knowledge just goes downhill from there.  So, and to think that this issue is not systematic is just like turn a blind eye into that.  So there's definitely a correlation and we kind of know why that is.  Also speaking about the numbers as far as I know that general participation in the developer community of women is about 12 or 14% something like this. So 3% yeah.  Of course, but yeah, but 3% seems lower than general industry.  So fine. Six, five depends on again. We're ranging one to 11%, but not higher than that, depending on the community in developer like general development, not open source is 25% max.  So that's already a big difference, but 3% is more close to the to the total open source participants.  I mean, those results we have to wonder which jobs that they, you know, count in those statistics.  I actually don't.  I mean, we definitely have huge salary gaps still power gaps.  I mean, you see different like even when they fix the pay ratio, then I say they fix the bonus ratio or how much percentage get promoted.  You see in computer science, especially has the most basically you have people leaving the field that are women and minority at a higher pace than your like I coming in.  So you actually have a survival rate that drops that says that there's a reason they're leaving.  What that is, there's a lot of research there. A lot of it is bad environments and bad systems.  Making sure that when you design your community and you open source product in your governance to make sure that this is comfortable.  And if you're like me, which is a white male American, you look go. Okay.  If I want this person, you should be what do they need to feel safe, valued and honestly can afford to go and afford to participate.  And those are going to be different answers depending on what country you're talking about what gender and what you look like.  So thank you so much for participating and for answering it for the questions.  So, yes, thank you.
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No, no, no, don't worry. Okay, so. Yes, yeah, I don't know what to put. Can we use this? What's the developer's side and which one is the. Okay, so dark one is the developer. And the white ones are the designers. Okay, great. I'm going to take one too. Okay. Yes, yes, yes. Okay. Just I want to introduce the interaction part. Okay, so we will have some introductory questions just to know the audience and you can use the the short link if you want to vote from your phone or you can scan it with the QR code and it's important to know from the room. How many designers there are and how many developers there are to know the representative and while you do this and get the survey we're going to introduce ourselves. So my name is the cat in a more and I'm an interaction designer for about 10 years for an open source project, which is the key. Okay, and I'm going to. Hi, so I'm Timon. I'm actually in like computer games, mostly right now. But before that, I did some work for iOS as well. That was more. I was a programmer, but you know, there's a little bit of design in all programming work. Nice. I'm Belen. I am an interaction designer and design researcher. I've been doing these for over a decade now and I've been contributing to free software for about seven years now. I'm young. I'm also an interaction designer, mostly on the next cloud and also some other smaller open source projects. Hi, I'm Donald Abrams past 18 months. I've been I worked in vision on studio doing the animation tools right now. I'm working for the O. K. Moe Foundation's community manager. Yes, this is going to be the hardest part of moving the microphone. Okay, so I'm going to update this. Okay, okay. So we have like 14 developers, six designers and some other people, which is interesting because it's interesting. Being a designer room, we have some good representations just shy developers that will vote mostly from their phones. Okay, the next question is if you have a designer in your project community and I would like maybe the panel members to say if they have multiple designers in their community. And if they work for multiple communities. Well, so like I said, I'm mostly on the corporate side, kind of computer games are appropriate. I so I can save much for open source. And most of the projects open source projects I'm involved in. No, no, designers. Mostly because it's like the graphics kind of things. So but there are company. Basically everybody's responsible for his like we have my my my extras. So if you're a like if you're the sound guy, you're the sound guy, you do everything that is sound related and you have to work with other people to make all of that work. But there's no, you know, person who's responsible for the design on the UI side, even we very often have people responsible for certain parts of the UI. But it's not always necessarily a person who is responsible for designing all of the way and then a separate person responsible for making the UI usually it's kind of connected because we have a small team. In every single open source project I've contributed to have been the only designer. Yeah, I would say in every open source project, I'm in I'm the only like designer with a design education or a design studies background, so to say, but there's a bunch of front end people or even like I would say more and more front end people who are also more design minded, which is good to see, of course, or yeah, developers who also get more and more design minded. At Envision, we definitely had a lot of designers on staff because but it's interesting, they're designing for designers. And they had a lot of power they basically to make product owners to a large degree. And then at OCaml Foundation, we very, very small. We're actually contracting our design right now for the bits that we needed and we're looking at what more we need. Okay, and for for my case in XRK for the past 10 years, I've been the only designer to so that's why we actually we did this community in order to not be alone anymore and to get feedback. Yeah, the project says, okay, so this is quite a calibrated. I'm curious to see if we will ever do a panel if this changes over time and if we have more and more designers involved. Okay, the next question is what communities do you think they need designers and okay, are they small, medium popular or they're optional? We are small and I guess 12 people. What I would say is in our company and our general ideas that we just don't have the resources to have a specific designer. Not so much because a person who's designing is not doing work in a way. Not that really, but the problem is that also creates more work in the sense of like more overhead to get a result. If you just have a programmer doing the programming and he just says, oh, I'm going to do this and then just does it. That's very quick. So we have a very short iteration process because of that. Whereas when you're designing, you have to first design, you have to think of all of the use cases, you have to then implement them and the end result probably will be much better, but it takes longer to get there. So what are the other projects that have like one or two people that are doing and like your idea and would you think you would like a designer or sizes better on that? Well, in my case, I've worked in both streams. I contributed to the Yachter project, which is Sanyo's Foundation initiative and there was a massive project. I was still the only designer and in that case, the designer was considered optional, right? I was disposable. But I also worked in a one man bands like the video, the video program that they use here at Fostom to process all the talks. And that's a one person project. And in that case, I felt very much valued and, you know, that he was really appreciated my work, the maintainer. So I think I'm not sure size, what is the factor here? Yeah, I guess the most true answer, I guess that most people unfortunately would give us D, but what is the correct answer is a. So the especially because a lot of proprietary projects are Silicon Valley projects or whatever are co-founded or led by designers, which unfortunately brings us in a tight spot because we have to compete with that basically. So, yeah, that's very important that we look at this a not just as like, oh, we have so few resources and I hope that the jobs board of open sources and can help with that to solve these small tasks or do it in small steps. So I have a more nuanced thought on this. So design is kind of an overloaded term. A lot of times the degree programs are called visual communications for a reason because it's another form of communication. So really you bring a designer in once it surpasses your average person's ability to communicate what's happening. So if you're doing like a blockchain startup and it's a small people, those things are very, very difficult to both communicate and understand. And they're going to be designer much earlier than something that's more well understood by the people you're communicating to. So again, it's doesn't really the size of the project is more about the complexity of what you need to communicate because you need an expert to notice how to whittle it down and balance both copy and visual design. Or interactive design in a lot of your cases. Yes, yes. So the results are medium projects. So people maybe consider that you need to be a sizable team in order to need someone dedicated for this kind of work. Maybe there are also financial reasons for this voting. Okay, this is more like a marketing slide. But the idea is if you are looking for a designer as a no-possessor contributor, where would you go to look for one? And the option D is like our open source design job board where we try to reach the gap. But yeah, I don't know if you want to say anything besides this. And I don't know how many had the time to vote to vote. But the majority say other. I'm curious what that other means, but and maybe I have some bugs in the. Okay, so this means just paid designers, not necessarily somebody that could volunteer and do it for free. Okay, and the question is what kind of designer do you need for your project? And this would be interesting to know how you vote because there's also lack of education in the vast areas of design. And I don't know when people looking for a designer, if they know exactly what they want and designers expect you to have the jargon and know exactly what you're requesting. Do you have any remarks about this? I guess the issue is and maybe Belen can or Bernard also can say more about this, but I guess that user researcher, for example, is not going to be really answered by anyone or it's not really something that you think about because it's not something that you see that you think that you need. Whereas graphic designer if you say, oh, we need a logo or we need some illustrations. Yeah, that's obvious. But it's not obvious that you need a user researcher or a usability engineer. Also very quickly mentioned that these are roles, not people. I do several of those things, for example. So these are roles, not much directly to people necessarily. And another issue is that I put there the front end developer and a lot of communities, they expect someone to do also the implementation. But in our community, we usually we don't know to do that part and also the projects are very diverse and in a lot of languages. So we might not feel that that need. And I'm curious what people said. Okay, so there are eight people that said that they don't know. Yes. Wait. So my question is, since I answered, I don't know. It's partly because I'm not sure what's the difference between some of those roles. Could you explain what's the difference between interaction designer, usability engineer and UX designer? I want to explain this. I can try. A lot of it has to do with where in the funnel it is. And so you have people that are trying to find out more about your users, which are your researchers. All the way. And there's a different piece of the funnel all the way down to the front end developer, which is actually making it real. And there's different specialties that are broken down inside. I actually don't know of any good resources on that explain the difference between each one. And actually, there's a lot of arguments in the design community. What when you're putting out for a role, what do you title it because these things are all very different. I'm going to be fairly brutal in here. I'm going to say that out of all those things, a graphic designer tend to be a different person. A front end developer tends to be a different person. Everything else is what, what did you call it? Slang. It's the same thing. But we are an industry, I think that tend to make up fancy words. Very separate as well. Actually, I think it's a core element of the interaction design discipline. The statistics in the math part. The statistics in the math part. So actually usability engineers very often will not do statistically significant studies anyway. It also depends on the person. So some are more generalized and they as Balan said, they want to do all, but some they are specialized and they, I don't know, they do just accessibility or. And the next question is for how long would you need a designer and the options are one time periodic full time and issue based. And this is important when you want to contribute with collaborate with somebody because that person might have a limited time or if you want them to stay like a couple of years, you might need to find them in some ways. Any remark. So, I should for me right now, I actually need a one time, but very specifically, I want to deliver with a small design system. So when they're putting other pieces, allow me to sort of remix it with some guidelines and that enables me to not mean necessarily need the periodic. So the list of votes we have for one time. So people who want some kind of long term involvement of the designer in the project. I think that's super important. You have been 10 years in next week. I was five years in Dr. Project. I think establishing long term collaborations is actually key. Now there was going to be very efficient to work you do the amount of interaction you have to do to get into the project. You do kind of have to understand it first before you can actually do any work. And also depend on the project. I mean, it's a platform and it's very complex and you still have work to do for a longer period of time. But if it's just a logo design, you cannot stay for a long time. You just dropped the logo. Yeah, yeah, no, sure. OK, yes. Yeah, I am one of the other people. So not the designer and my theater director. And I wanted to make a short statement on the political task of open source design because for me we were four people working together from the beginning to people more coming from design side and to developers. And I think in a lot of software, the mainstream people are using what they see is very different to what's happening on the technical side. And I think for me it's a really, really in political issue to create design, to create a design that enlightens people about how the architecture is working actually because we need to make more people aware of how technical stuff is happening. And it is mostly a design issue. And that's really a statement. So please talk from the beginning on, get people in there. And I didn't know anything about the developing process and I had to learn a lot. But then we had big discussions and I said, no, I don't want to have hierarchical software architecture. And then there were a lot of good ideas because we started in the beginning. And that's like, I think the political issue that's really unclear for a lot of people that there's like an enlightenment that can happen so people can understand how things are working if it's like more transparent to the architecture. Cool. Thanks. Okay. And this question asks, does your community list the design contribution rules? Do you want to comment something about the options? No. So we have options like the design issues list. How many of you do you have this? I mean, I will see when the results are come. But it's very important to showcase and list them in the issue tracker is the most easiest because every developer are using them constantly. But if you as a designer coming through a community and you don't know exactly what is needed, there's no way to find it. Yeah. So what is often missing I guess in projects is a, or what is often there in projects and open source projects is some kind of contribution page. So how to get involved as a developer, as a translator, whatever else as a writer or something or marketing. But what is often missing is design. Even if it's there, it's mostly maybe just a link or something. And what would be really good is to have some kind of dedicated like slash design page for a project where you really have like specific things like like almost everything like that like design issues list. Decision makers feedback conduct deliverables communication channels. And yeah, this is also something that we should maybe list or review on other projects where we say, hey, we prior or prioritize projects, which actually have a page like that and allow people to be onboard or make it easier for people to onboard themselves. I was actually kind of interested to hear more about how do you guys usually keep the documentation for design, because the format in which you keep the documentation will, I think, decide a lot how you can how people can contribute right. So any thoughts? Yes, just coming out of the industry, there's a lot of work on design systems and being able to sort of hand them off. And I think it's still relatively in its infancy. We have like three or four big competitors, but in terms of we don't have a standard deliverable format. I think we have a principle behind it, which is like the Brad Frost and atomic design for web and app. But that doesn't even really touch interactive that well. So it's it's it's happening, but I think it's still in its infancy. So like handing it off as a deliverable and we're just not there yet. It's just text design documents basically. You can hear it off a DSM system, but you're locking them into the system. So the next question is that if you think that money is a factor for limited contribution in OS and there was a tweet that somebody said that most designers are in compensated at level that encourages contributions. And I'm just going to update to see what you said. And it's true. Does anyone want to comment about money? I mean, it's a distinct and delicate topic, but I wanted to slide about it because maybe have different opinions. Hi, my name is Dave Crossland and I've worked for many years on Libre Fonts type. So I'm Dave Crossland. I work for many years on Libre Fonts and Libre font design type based design is a very specialist area of design graphic design in general. It requires a long time to practice to be able to do it well. And often people have to invest tens of thousands of euros in university courses to get to that level. They're very often very against the idea that they would give away work that they worked for months or years on full time. Nevertheless, there are a lot of Libre Fonts which are out there, not only from Google, but also from other companies where they've seen that it's more valuable for them to make the font available under a Libre license than to restrict it. And so I think that the tweet is interesting that most designers are not compensated at a general level compared to software engineers. But a lot of designers are working in very small studios or freelance compared to software engineers. And if you understand the business value propositions of free licensing, then potentially you can earn good money doing open design. The next question. No. So this is a double session. So please relax because I have like 10 more questions. The next question is if you think that the university or industry influences the tools and format that designers use. If you want to say something about that. Absolutely working in vision. We definitely worked very strongly with a lot of those programs to seed it in early. And maybe everyone has a student license for a reason. It's to get to lock them in early. And it's just a great way to get my share super early. Yeah, I was just recently at a design university and it was a bit strange how the students are like all the hot shit like, oh, did you hear about Framer and I mean, in vision and figma and whatever that's already old. And the new stuff is like, yeah, always the latest things and I was just, yeah, okay, so you learn a new tool like every year or whatever. And it's, I mean, I would say it definitely influences it. I would also say it's a pity that that necessarily happens. Yeah, that there's no kind of standard that that stays there because I personally think that pen and paper is still or or or whiteboard or something is really valuable to us for collaboration. I'm going to blame the university is in here like I'm a PhD candidate in the design school at Northumbria University and basically what they provide to their students is that obvious stuff. I think they something needs to change in the mindset of educators as well. And but I don't know how that's going to happen. And there was also a case when somebody requested design and contributor give them a sketch file and the developers said I cannot see that I don't have the tools or what you're going to do and using open formats like SVG and exporting them. It should be easy for for everyone. Okay, so the next question is, do you need to be a user first in order to contribute? Anyone has an opinion on this? So let's see some results. Okay, they're kind of the equal. No, no. So, so I have a I have a tweet. It says that pretty much all open source contributors start out as users which limit the number of projects that the designer by reasonable expected to want to contribute to. I mean, if let's say designer might use the tools, they might want to contribute to game for escape. But besides this, they would need to contribute to projects that they haven't used before. So I work a bit with both with design and development. So what? Okay, I work with a little bit of both. Okay, so I work with a bit of both design and development. But so the question is like how do designers actually pick projects that they would like to work on? Because like as a developer, it's either your skillset or like a project that you're attached to, but then you're attached to the project there, not the skillset. So how do designers go about building their preferences? Okay, so as Jan said, maybe they will pick a project because it has that list of design issues or they have a read me and it will be easy for them to to job on board. Otherwise, I don't know, maybe money. If that project can propose some I wouldn't necessarily say that you have to be a user first is always good to be user. But as a designer, you should have some sort of ability to step into people's shoes, which is the quality that you should have as a designer or do research and really find out what what the users do. Oftentimes, being a user doesn't help but is actually counterproductive because you're you're too much actually in your own workflows and think too much about the way you use the software yourself. So sometimes really happens to step a long way back. I mean, I often do that also with the project that I work on and really helps after like one week of really not looking at it at all. Then you're like, oh, this is absolute bullshit. And then you change it. So that really helps. Yeah, I think it doesn't really matter that much if you are a user first, but I think you definitely needs to need to become a user after it. So once you get involved and they start contributing, you have to understand the software and it's important that you use it as well. I just think it's really important to balance the needs of like a first time early user and a power user, people that come in as a user first and they're sort of optimizing their experiences are really designing for a power user in case and requires expertise to step back and really sit there and design for the first time user. And we did to we had to envision we had two different cycles for this we had internal tickets that we generate because we would use it for own stuff. And then we'd have the external ones that we would go and talk to users or people are using out in the street and that they're having the two cycles really helped. Also, if you spend a lot of time designing a project, you will need to do usability tests to see the how first interactions do so you cannot do it yourself, but you need users at least to do it. Okay, so the next question is the designer need to learn get and Bell and do you have something. You don't know. So I was at this at this university, as I said, and oh, okay, yeah. So feel free to punch me but no, they should not. And I mean, I do know get and I would say it's it's a good probably but it shouldn't be. And like it starts at the level because those students, for example, I showed them get up desktop, for example, which is a non terminal interface for get. But still the design itself and the wording like clone push and pull is totally bonkers like it should be first of all, it should be automatic, or it should be called upload download it should be called save or something like that. It's like these basic things you kind of expect, you know, yeah. And from the developer here, I'm going to say that developers need to learn how to use get first. We've all have a ton of problems, whether it be a small merge commits, like conflict resolution like we don't know how to do it. So I beyond compare charges 100 bucks to get a license is because it's hard. There are a bunch of design version control systems currently being developed. Avacoat I think is one of them is a bunch of others. Different system in terms of you have people use do things visually and it's a lot of times it is also different version control for copies in terms of going through approval processes and different pieces. It's a different system than code. No, I don't think they should learn how to do just get unless they're expected to be coding HTML along with you all in that case. And I have to learn to use one of the two GUIs hopefully that's well designed. Well, I did want to say, yeah, of course get this back to basis of everything and you have to learn it. How are you going to cooperate with the developer? No, no, that's I mean it depends on the format in which you have your date. It's true that if it's more graphical, if it's more like a wiki style thing where you need to make comments for things, get just wouldn't make sense. The merge conflicts would be horrible. On the other hand, so for example, get design wise is the problem with it is that it's very poorly explained to people, but it's actually very easy. You just have to think of a tree of patches. It's just a tree of patches and then all of the commands modify that tree and simple. Can I say something very quickly? I don't think they have to, but they definitely shoot. Git is an amazing tool. And it's also because when you're for me, what happened was that when I learned Git, I wasn't really learning about Git. I wasn't even learning about version control. I was learning about design as my design material and that was really powerful. So I think they should they don't have to. And there's also a tweet at the bottom who says that most open source development happens on GitHub and it should be great to see that platform expands to support designs. My question is, so many people here answer true designer needs to learn Git. I would like to ask why designers need to learn Git. I understand that they have to understand the versioning system and that's why does it enhance the collaboration between designer and developers. So it's a question for developers. Because maybe when we create a project with image icon icon with different size, if you can't modify it, it has to be the developer to modify this. It will be more comfortable for the designer to modify. Your saying is going to be faster if a designer does it. Okay. Sorry, thank you. I wanted to say a quick note about this. And I think that this is two questions implicitly into one. One is whether we use Git as a specific set of technologies to do version control. And if designers should use that specific tool, another one that is very different and is being answered as well is whether there should be some version control for the overall design. So we can track back to changes and relate to that as different user experiences. I think that may shed some light on this. So on the technology side, we have a law called Conway's law that we use for demand or design. It's basically your system ends up looking like your communication structure. And so the question is how are you communicating between your designer and developer? If that communication is happening with HTML and CSS, then that needs to feature branches and so on, then they need to learn Git because that's how they need to collaborate. And I've had that at places I've worked with, such as Craftsy and Vision. But if your handoff point is further off where you have front-end developers that are expected to take changes and mockups and get updates and then turn that into HTML and CSS and that's your handoff point, then no, they don't need to learn it. So it really depends on what your communication substrate is and how you design your organization. So the next is a remark and it says that design is not perceived as valuable as code. And people said 13 votes for true and 9 for false. Any comments on that? If not, we go to the next question. Straight up comment. If you have an ugly design, people are going to tell you about it much faster than that ugly hack you just wrote. It kind of depends on who looks at your code, but yeah. I guess it can sometimes be perceived, but then you use some crappy software and you immediately appreciate the value of good design. Thank you. I have a bit of a side question for the panel on this. And it may have something to do with the answers to this question. Where do you believe the ideation process fits into the software development lifecycle? And that's a question across the board because I think that might answer a lot of the reasons. So what exactly do you mean? When should we start the design or where does design fit within that process? Okay. So the answer is if the primary is the software development lifecycle, where does the design and design is a cycle just as a single point in and out? Where does that fit into the overall work? And if I say like it's in the beginning and then you just repeat? That's what I would. Okay. So that would be my answer. I mean, the answer by the book, of course, is at the very beginning. Who does that, you know, like, or where does that happen in practice? Is the, especially in open source software, rarely or never? One, I, or it's, this is a different point, I would say, specific to this, to this thing, the value ability is that, for example, on GitHub, because we talked about get before, they have this like punch card thingy, right? This calendar of contributions and the problem there is that they count commits, they count issue opens, they count per request. Don't count anything else. What I do mostly is comments on issues like design feedback. They do not count this at all. So, I mean, I also do open issues and I also do commit, but if I wouldn't do that, I would be invisible. So this is basically, I mean, as GitHub says on the front page, built for developers. So that's like the first mistake that has made. The, this is interesting. The answer by the book is at the beginning, I actually think the ideation process, it should be happening all across because the idea you're going to be learning, you're learning all the time through the process of designing and developing. So that should feed into ideation. That doesn't mean that specific stages do my focus more on that than on building, for example, or whatever. But I think it should be there all along. I think it's a very wide pipeline in a lot of ways. So, I mean, in the end, the first thing you have to know is everything about your user you can. What are their goals? What is this going to achieve for them? You have a person as a product specialist who's listening to a user researcher determine what the most opportunity is doing a ton of math with BAs to figure out what looks like. And if you're open source project and it's a project of passion, you're like, okay, does this achieve the goal better than all the other options? And that takes a lot of time and effort and energy. Sometimes you'll choose a design because it's easier to communicate. And that requires basically sketching out what the visual design is going down to sketching and different pieces. It's an incredibly variable depending on what product you're building, what your users are, how complex it is. If you have a marketplace versus a single use app, what's going on here? So it's not a single standard way to integrate design in organization. But it's definitely an important piece for every piece to understand the value of. And again, it really depends on what you say design is. Just from experience, I can say for me, it was always from the very beginning forever constantly. Basically, I always as a programmer, I'm constantly designing actually the software and that includes both the like the 12 person team writing computer games and my single person projects at home that I do. It's always constantly thinking, oh, I could do maybe this better or maybe I could do and then I just write down the idea and then later on I try to read through some of the things I wrote down and work on them. Anything else? I'll change the question. Okay. Okay, so the next question is as a contributor, have you ever felt technically shamed? By myself all the time. Why did I write this? So stupid. Oh, that was me again. I think that's something developers do. I've seen that answer. You know, I've seen this in so many developers. I don't really feel shame. I can say, oh, gee, I did this wrong, but I don't really I'm ashamed about it. We call it blaming, but we don't really think of it as that. Teaching is hard and like learning is basically getting used to embarrassment and just moving forward with it. Having a culture that supports basically feeling shamed and getting better and like using that to move forward and not make you feel like you need to stay in your lane and hide is a different environment. And I think it's important to design organization so that identifying when the shame is and then saying, okay, well, if you're going to call me on this, you need to teach it to me. And let's sit down and actually get over this because we can't have this happen over and over again because that's where that's where the organization should be ashamed. The thing is that it also depends on the project. So if you're a beginner designer and you might propose something that is outrageous and the developer might say, no, this is will never be implemented. So how did you not know that this is not implementable and can be a bit down for designer because he will lose confidence in him. But I don't say that we should always say that, oh, that's nice and that's beautiful. But yeah, and this applies not only for designers, but also for new contributors. So one thing for new contributors always check first whether what you're going to try to do actually makes sense. So just ask what needs doing like if you come to a project and you say, oh, I made this complete brand new design that for your project is going to be great. Everybody is going to look at you. Why? Just a comment on this. But as you mentioned also, the open source community is very focused on kind of technical elitism and you know you will recognize by your contribution. And I know that from I wasn't for them some years ago, and there was a similar discussion with people working on documentation and translation that are another kind of contribution. And it's very hard to enter a community and very hard to be recognized if you're not developer basically. And so putting some insights or in some way to show that the value that a designer, someone who works on documentation can provide to a community. I think it's very important and shifting a little bit the focus on developers and developing and code only to something more broad user experience is something that is probably in my in my opinion something that should be valued and probably be pushed in some way. There's just one thing I want to add to that as a developer. If you can write use cases for me if you can like basically make my work easier in any way that's ridiculous. You appreciate it. You cannot imagine the amount like it won't always show maybe but it really usually is very appreciate if you do any kind of work that organizes work for me in a way. So if it makes my work more efficient, more organized, more clear what the issue is even just going over issues in the backtracker and asking users what, you know, what's the actual problem here or why is this not working. What's your system stuff like that hugely helps. Okay, so the next question is, should open store designers have an engineering background. For me, I have an engineer I have a master in software engineering. And instead of coding, I decided to do interaction design. And it was helpful. Because I know how to commit and to develop and understand but background I mean, yes, yes, like. I can say no, but definitely not. And I also think that designers don't need to have an academic design background. You know, sometimes you learn on the job sometimes you know, I think the academic background is somehow irrelevant. It's useful if you're trying to communicate with engineers. So if you're designing open source tools for engineers, I mean, you're going to, that's basically user research you have. I was also going to say most. So I definitely agree with the academic part. You don't need academics. Sometimes even bad for you. Not really. But yeah. But no, like learning in practice on projects is always better than five minutes. I lost my foot. Sorry. I did want to say that yeah, usually it is good to have the background so that you know whether your ideas are easier to implement or not. Because if you can come up with a great design that is just unfeasible to implement and then it's kind of wasted effort. Hello everyone. For this question and for the previous one, a question came to my mind. Actually, I heard always the communication between designers and developers, but why we don't talk about analysts. For example, for use case diagrams or flaws, they can be also from an engineering background. And I think that the analyst position would be so helpful for such projects. And so my question is in general, are there also analysts for your during your projects or you communicate directly to the developers? Thank you. So again, depends on the size of the project. If they have an analyst that would it's already a big project and some of the analyst work is done by the interaction designers or. At the place we had the most successful product I've ever seen, we actually used to get them out of BA. So BA would do a lot of the sales talk and the number crunching. And then we would transition the ones usually with humanities backgrounds into product and design work. And we had extreme success with them. They were literally the best I've ever worked with in my career. Can you explain BA? Business analyst, sorry. Okay, next question is, would you trust the designer to make the best decision for your project? And there is a tweet from Nelson who says that since the merit system in project is based on contribution, why would you trust this new and unknown person to start making decisions about how the thing should work? So any comments on that? Definitely depends on the designer. If he has a background in engineering. No, mostly about whether I think they are. Seriously, though, I would say the design speaks for itself always. So it doesn't matter who it is. If the arguments are there for why this design is good, then sure. But it has to be merit based. It cannot be, oh, I like this new, I don't know, the material design. And I think it's the best thing ever. So we're now going to switch everything to material design that doesn't just useless basically. It's a fashion statement. I think it's kind of ridiculous to think you can even upfront know what the best decision is. All you can do is make an informed decision and designers are more than capable of making a well informed decision. I would say, especially since Andreas, the person who wrote the tweet as a designer also might be like a devil's advocate question. So I don't think he thinks that it's correct or proper that there's a merit system in open source software. Yeah, I don't know what his actual opinion is. I think trust needs to be earned. So you are a designer, you need to earn the trust of the community and they maybe they'll believe that George is the best decision. Okay, the next statement is that everyone has an opinion on design. And there's also a tweet commenting that it's really is really hard getting buying from project maintainers. It could take six plus months back and forth to get the logo designed. Any questions? From my side, I always I also always have opinions, but I always try to hold them back if they are just opinions. So you have to always think of the bigger project and the whole user base, not just your own use case. I think my other get the elephant is awesome. If you guys haven't heard about the elephant thing, it's you know the wise men with like one person touching the trunk and it's like, oh, it's a snake one person something the leg. So it's a tree. I know other places you can touch a very different experience. But in the end, it's a way that you know what it is is by everyone having a piece of it. So if you have something that serves more than one kind of user, they're going to each have a lens into it. So for example, like, there's lots of stuff out there not designed for me. So I guess I everyone has an opinion, but mostly it's their lens that they have their experience in. I mean, I would definitely say everyone has an opinion design, but it depends how you put them into words and how you argue them and how you back them with research or with with results or not results, but yeah, research or only research, I guess user testing and stuff, how it's how they how they then end up in the project or how you get value out of them because anyone can say anything. And it cannot be informed by any anything that makes sense. But if you actually do testing and research, which unfortunately is not often thought about, then you can actually do that. Just wait for the Twitter ratio. Okay, next question is with a like summary, but what do you think is the greatest attribute and always designer should have. And we're going to see other results and comment on that. Okay, so communication skill. I would have expected. I think you're always limited by what you're worse at. Do you think there is there any correlation between gender and noise participation. And I have some stats there that in UK, it's a step from 2014 70% of design students are female and participation open source of women is 3%. And also if you look in the room and the contributors in our small community, there are more many more females than 3% is a lot. I think. Just being kind of honest about it right now. Yeah, I also have some stats and like this been a study couple of years ago where they found out that a code done by women code done by women is approved or the higher eight than men, unless the gender is known. And if the gender is knowledge just goes downhill from there. So, and to think that this issue is not systematic is just like turn a blind eye into that. So there's definitely a correlation and we kind of know why that is. Also speaking about the numbers as far as I know that general participation in the developer community of women is about 12 or 14% something like this. So 3% yeah. Of course, but yeah, but 3% seems lower than general industry. So fine. Six, five depends on again. We're ranging one to 11%, but not higher than that, depending on the community in developer like general development, not open source is 25% max. So that's already a big difference, but 3% is more close to the to the total open source participants. I mean, those results we have to wonder which jobs that they, you know, count in those statistics. I actually don't. I mean, we definitely have huge salary gaps still power gaps. I mean, you see different like even when they fix the pay ratio, then I say they fix the bonus ratio or how much percentage get promoted. You see in computer science, especially has the most basically you have people leaving the field that are women and minority at a higher pace than your like I coming in. So you actually have a survival rate that drops that says that there's a reason they're leaving. What that is, there's a lot of research there. A lot of it is bad environments and bad systems. Making sure that when you design your community and you open source product in your governance to make sure that this is comfortable. And if you're like me, which is a white male American, you look go. Okay. If I want this person, you should be what do they need to feel safe, valued and honestly can afford to go and afford to participate. And those are going to be different answers depending on what country you're talking about what gender and what you look like. So thank you so much for participating and for answering it for the questions. So, yes, thank you.
vote mostly from their phones. Okay, the next and if we have more and more designers involved. end result probably will be much better, but it of open sources and can help with that to solve the size of the project is more about the projects and open source projects is some kind of into the system. So the next question is that if thing is that it also depends on the project. So is something that is probably in my in my opinion