Onboarding Designers into Open Source Projects
summary
CHAOSS Africa describes a repeatable onboarding stack that turns interested designers into active contributors: pinned Slack contribution guideline, a shared Figma workspace with open-source design docs, a formal design system and templates, and bi-weekly design calls plus decentralized project leads. The community reports onboarding about 40 designers who remain active, fewer handoffs to overwhelmed maintainers, faster issue fixes, and clearer UX contributions across projects like AO and AOS.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction to talk
- 1:03Designers in open source
- 2:29Emmanuel’s open source journey
- 4:34Case study: Chaos Community
- 6:01Clear contribution guidelines
- 8:06Bi-weekly design calls
- 9:30Design systems for contributors
- 11:21Documentation beyond design
- 12:22Dedicated project leads
- 14:53Building community relationships
- 17:20Non-design contributions
- 19:08Call to action for inclusivity
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