While researching FOSS design, one concept I'm pondering - to overcome scattered UX confusion - is the idea of annual elections for a Product Design lead to oversee wider UX coherence. If they do well, they get re-elected. Does anyone know of similar concept in FOSS organisation? - ThreadSky

tantacrul.bsky.social • 3 days ago

While researching FOSS design, one concept I'm pondering - to overcome scattered UX confusion - is the idea of annual elections for a Product Design lead to oversee wider UX coherence. If they do well, they get re-elected. Does anyone know of similar concept in FOSS organisation?

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maddyguthridge.bsky.social•2 days ago

Every two years, KDE (the Linux desktop) has a community-wide vote for their primary goals. Each goal is championed by a small team who work across the project to help make it a reality. The goals are often UX-oriented (such as improving support for input methods). https://blogs.kde.org/2024/09/07/kde-goals-a-new-cycle-begins/

tantacrul.bsky.social•1 hour ago

Brilliant. Thank you!

vinlauria.bsky.social•3 days ago

Is this for a specific product or FOSS in general?

tantacrul.bsky.social•3 days ago

FOSS in general. I'm trying to think of various suggestions for a high level charter teams can use to build a product with excellent usability.

vinlauria.bsky.social•3 days ago

Just an amateur spitballing here, but I feel like establishing standards is the name of the game. I know freedom to customize is a major perk of FOSS and I'm not saying go full Electron, but when even the major FOSS apps use so many different frameworks and design conventions, there's no baseline.

vinlauria.bsky.social•3 days ago

I look at the work groups like Khronos have done and wanna emulate that. Like maybe a rolling standard: "to meet the 2025 revision of the spec, your app needs to by default obey THESE conventions, run on THESE versions of THESE frameworks, and work with THESE formats" would go a long way.

tantacrul.bsky.social•2 days ago

Unfortunately, specs and best practices are only as useful as the organisation applying them. If it's 14 different people referencing the same spec, you'll get 14 different interpretations. There has to be a centralised final decision maker.

vinlauria.bsky.social•2 days ago

I suppose some sort of central authority which devs could submit their work to for certification would be too much bureaucracy? I was originally gonna suggest major FOSS players like Blender Foundation, MuseGroup, KDE, etc. open talk with each other regarding a standards alliance, but fair enough.

vinlauria.bsky.social•3 days ago

Now, I can see pushback from the power-user crowd on that, but I envision such a thing not as a strict requirement that MUST be met by all FOSS at all times, but just serve as an assurance to lay-users on certified apps: "you're guaranteed this minimum standard user experience out of the box".

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