Looking for more transparency on your project, or to break down silos and become more collaborative? Maybe you would like to increase insights and increase possibility to innovate? An open source design process might be what you are looking for!

1. Harnessing the Power
of an Open Source
Design Process

2. Who am I?
Monica Granfield
UX Design + Strategy, Redhat
mgranfie@redhat.com

3. What is an Open Source Community?
"Alone we can do so little; together we can
do so much." –Helen Keller

4. OS Community is ...
Tenets
● Transparent
● Inclusive
● Open
● Collaborative
● Flexible

5. OS Leadership is ...
○ Willingness to trust and share information and ideas.
○ Appreciation for transparency and collaboration whenever
possible.
○ Sensitivity to moods, emotion and passions of the people
that make up an organization.
○ Knowledge of not only what to share, but how to share it.
○ Belief that groups will consistently outperform individuals
working in isolation.
○ Trust in those groups to drive necessary change.
○ Continuous collaboration around a common goal.

6. Contributing to a Community
Benefits
○ Opportunity
○ Collaboration
○ Learning + Growth
○ Pushing boundaries

7. Meritocracy
○ Does not mean
■ That there are not decision makers.
■ That you have to please everyone.
■ That goals and intentions don’t exist.
○ Does mean
■ Challenging and open discussions to draw on a
collective knowledge.
■ Ideas are not based on role but on merit.
■ Ideas should align to and enhance goals and intent.
■ Leadership is earned.
.
“You’re not your code” and “You’re not your design.”

8. Open Decision Framework (ODF)

9. ODF
What is it?
Provides an inclusive and transparent decision making process that
means, your ideas will be heard and why decisions are made and
how they align to the strategy and goals, will be available to you.
■ Transparent
■ Inclusive
■ User Centric

10. ODF
How does it work?
● Plan, Research
● Engage Customers + Collaborators
● Set expectations up front
○ What types of feedback you are looking for + who is making the decisions.
○ Problems to solve, goals and intentions of the design solution.
○ Publish decision process and project plan with related information.
● Design, Test, Design
● Explain the obvious
○ Publish decision factors, research, trade-offs,
biz requirements
○ Socialize decisions
● Evaluate, acknowledge and incorporate feedback
● Highlight changes made in response to feedback
● Invite collaborators to raise risks and concerns you may
have overlooked

11. “How is this much different than
how I work with my team and
design now, within a lean and
iterative environment?”

12. Contributing to a Community
It isn’t and it is different
● It differs in how you work and the idea that you should understand any
of the work that is being done.
● Decisions are available to access, by anyone, at any time.
● Anyone can contribute to the product.

13. PatternFly Community
How does it work?
● Support 15 product lines
● 4 Technologies (Angular 1 + 4, React, Core - HTML/CSS)
● PF Team - 5 (Leads, Devs, Design, Research)
● UXD Team - 83 (Leads, Devs, Design, Research)

14. PatternFly Challenges
Open Source Challenges
○ GitHub is not great for designers
○ Contributors vary in skill levels and interests
○ Multiple technologies
○ Scaling solutions for range of uses and multiple
implementations
○ Reconciling consistency across multiple
implementations

15. How we overcome these challenges …

16. With Open Source Design

17. Open Source Design
○ An environment and a process that invites anyone to participate in,
sharing ideas, that lend themselves to creating design solutions
○ Collaborating with the community, engaging in feedback and learning
from it.
○ Roles do not determine the merit of an idea.

18. Open Source Design Process
Community

19. Open Source Tools
atom source tree gitkracken
slack google
github

20. Contributions to PatternFly Design
GitHub Issue
○ Idea Type (new vs. enhancement)
○ Requirements
○ Use Cases
○ Internal Products
○ Scope of Work
○ Concepts

21. Open Decision Design Framework
Decisions are made based on open source
principles
● Open exchange of solutions + assets.
● Participation of others
● Review Early + Often for rapid feedback
● Meritocracy collaboration + successful
ideas rise.
● Communities more diverse ideas, can
achieve more.

22. Open Decision Design Framework
Being prepared with knowledge and
clear on the INTENTION of the design
is important.

23. Open Decision Design Framework
Be TRANSPARENT with information such
as, being clear on what you are working to
achieve, how decisions will be made and
who the decision makers are.

24. ● Make decisions INCLUSIVE. We want to
make decisions happen, change happens
more quickly if you get people involved up
front.
● Remain INCLUSIVE while gathering and
parsing information and working to
understand input, where you don’t know
backgrounds or abilities.
Open Decision Design Framework

25. Open Decision Design Framework
Remaining truly OPEN minded and rational while
reviewing contributions and ideas against
established decisions, design and product goals.

26. Open Decision Design Framework
Don’t invite people to just adopt your ideas,
but to COLLABORATE on them with you, to
modify, adapt, repurpose or grow ideas.

27. Open Decision Design Framework
When you design UI’s across multiple products, you have
to be FLEXIBLE.
○ Consider needs and requirements of all products.
○ Consider implementation issues across technologies.
○ Strive for a common and universal solution, as a basis
to build on.

28. Open Design for you, your team, project,
organization
○ Use it in your product team, scrum
team, project, a micro open design
climate.
○ Across organizations.
○ Broaden input to generate ideas and
solutions.
○ Less siloed decisions and more cross
pollination of review of ideas and
solutions, yields more innovation.

29. Wrap Up
Applying Open Source methods
to the Design Process
○ Principles
○ Framework
○ Tools
Ideas will have greater potential
and more possibilities!
Thanks for your
feedback on the
work I posted to
GitHub...
It’s a great idea.
I’m working on
something
similar, let’s talk!

30. Thank You!
@monicagr
References:
The Open Organization, Jim Whitehurst
Opensource.com
Open Decision Framework - Redhat