where I felt I would be a good fit with my experience in UX design.
where I felt I would be a good fit with my experience in UX design
while contributing to Tor Project last year
What contributions are those? Wanna see it too.
I couldn’t find the correct role for me in this open-source world.
I believe roles are a corporate thing. They need to distribute money, and they need to explain people what all these other people are doing. Corporates also like to build hierarchical structures, have an order of authority, and a lot of roles stem solely for that. That doesn’t mean people want to obey or like the design imposed by assigned authorities, but they will keep silence, because it is not their responsibility. In Open Source if people don’t like something, they will at least be open to explain why they won’t do it.
In Open Source you just contribute what you can. And it is much harder, because the main skills in Open Source is not coding, but communication. No matter if you’re developer or not. Expecting people to do things for you quite often has a opposite effect (I did so many things that prove that that I can write a PhD). Doing some things that people want for them works better. Or finding those who are open to experiments.
Another issue with the method was that Fedora Pagure doesn’t support linking images in the PR.
Yea, and also can lose entered text if the cookie expired. Have you made a list of all things that make design work hard in traditional trackers? It takes and experience to discover things like https://kactus.io/ and master them, and in the end it is not Open Source.
One of the regions where I also struggled was using Open Source Design tools. There isn’t a variety of open-source tools for designers to choose from.
I feel the pain. I think the problem is that designers do not want to invest the time if fixing tools after they have already trained the painless process with proprietary kits. I can understand that for things like Photoshop, where people are teaching it, because people (and jobs) demand it. For UX design I don’t have a lot of experience beyond paper, pen and stickers. I think UX design in Open Source are uncharted waters, but those how map them, unfortunately, should not only be well versed in persuading people that there is something valuable there, but also able to come up with prototypes. Doesn’t look realistic.
On the contrary I believe nobody denies the need in Open Source design tools. Just for the possibility to adopt them for your delivery pipelines on the source level, starting with versioning, commenting, chatops, etc. The reason why nobody pushes it, I think, is because designers are not really close to Open Source culture. Which I also attribute to the culture / education that they are being trained for corporate world first. In opposite to having fun helping people in community. Just a speculation. Not sure I have a point here. Maybe I want to say that people pursue credits, and getting credits for non-code contributions is hard. You said this.
While working on the issue assigned to us during the contribution period, I feared other contributors could pick up and build on the ideas I shared.
That’s one of the most appreciated thing in the post. Building on ideas of other people is just one of the most important thing in Open Source for me. And I understand that if I come to Open Source with the purpose to show a solid resume, I may be more competitive and protective rather than collaborative, so that in the end all the things that are done could be attributed to me. Like with Open Source bounty hunting - once somebody works on some issue for money, why I would want to help them for free? Well, sometimes I don’t mind helping, but when I work on the bounty myself, I also feel uncomfortable that I need to share the bounty. Quite often because it is already work for peanuts. Maybe I misread what you wrote. Like designers feel protective over ideas, and feel insecure if people take these ideas and start implementing them. But I think it is the opposite - if people are inspired - that means they liked the design. The problem is when you (or me, whatever) wants to claim their ownership of the ideas. I’ve seen such conflicts more often than I’d like to in winning hackaton teams, even when I came there with prebaked solution, and allowed people to have fun reassembling it from scratch giving the necessary puzzle pieces. It is very hard for UX designers to get attribution for their work. Because UX design as a mutually collaborative process where everybody feels related. So my generic advice to designers would be - be a great communicator to facilitate design, not enforce it. Then people could recommend you, because they had great experience themselves.
I had never used or come across a discussion about open-source design tools.
Nobody feels experienced enough. So you are the best person to start it. ) Sometimes it takes many years and a critical mass of people capable of making constructive proposals (there is a Blender in my head).
In conclusion, Open Source design tools suxx, because designers are not interested to improve them, but also because it is very hard to improve it Open Source way (do it yourself). I am not blaming anyone. I am using GitHub daily after trying to improve Roundup, Trac, Mantis, GitLab, sr.ht and probably other things I’ve forgot. But I believe that designers can actually revert the trend by inspiring the changes with great design for Proposals For Improvements (PFI - just minted it). It is like RFC, but you know, next century version, that looks great on GPU.
This PFI is one good example.
In conclusion, the points in your post are all valid. Good start for a journey in a Open Source world where everybody has an opinion. So, Welcome.