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Big Tech Wants You Trapped. The Open Web Sets You Free
(www.joanwestenberg.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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Thanks for the video, it was great!
What frustrated me, though, was that she joined Bevy by keeping at it and going out of her way to prove her worth (i.e. the way devs get into projects), but then suggests devs go out of their way instead to attract project managers (and designers, presumably). That's not very fun to hear, but I guess that's the way it is.
There's also a link to Matrix, which I'm guessing is the preferred way to jump in and ask questions about how to contribute.
In general, I recommend coming with the intention of being assigned work ("I'm a UX designer and I'd love to help mock up stuff"), but also with ideas on how to improve what's there (e.g. "I found frustrating and would love to show some mockups on how to improve it"). That's the ideal scenario IMO, because it offers to reduce work of existing maintainers without asking for anything in return.
However, that's apparently not happening.
Where would you naturally look for this? With developers it's easy, you look for "CONTRIBUTING.md" or similar in the repo, as well as hints from templates in issues and PRs. Some will have extensive style guides and whatnot, but most are pretty bare bones.
Should this go on the main website? Somewhere at the start of the technical docs? In the repo in a special place linked from the root?
What about tooling? Should projects set up something like penpot (found after a search for FOSS Figma)? Or are designers okay with images on a wiki or something? Is it reasonable to ask them to submit a GitHub issue and engage that way (they could link to something else)?
I'm genuinely interested here because I'm hopefully going to launch a FOSS project this year, and I would like to facilitate that type of discussion, I just don't know how to do that effectively. To me, linking a chat and the repo is enough, but maybe it's not.
Yes but asking directly instead of consuming already-written guidelines is a much higher psychological hill to climb and doesn't feel welcoming. You need to be very passionate to go to Matrix. Also, frankly speaking, UX people are very unlikely to have a user on Matrix or even know what it is or how it works. Developers on the other hand can easily figure this out. You need to be mindful of tech literacy when you're trying to cater to UX people - they won't know anything about Matrix probably.
I don't think that's bad, but for developers this is very easy with all the guidelines and the "good first issues" and all that. For UX people, none of these resources exist.
At the very least this could be in the contributing guidelines on GitHub, but I think having it on the main website (a place much more familiar and friendly to non-technical people) is much better.
I don't know, I'm not a UX person. Ask them when they arrive. But I would think they can probably figure out to interact on GitHub issues if directed to do so. Developers intuitively know "Oh I want to contribute so I'll need a GitHub account and then need to go look at issues" but UX people don't know this.
I definitely don't think that's enough - UX people probably don't even know what a "repo" is.
This is a frustrating nut to crack, thanks for your patience.
I'll ask our UX people at work what they'd expect. UX and project management are pretty far down the list of considerations when starting/joining a FOSS project, so thanks for your insights.