Lessons from Mentoring and Supporting Designers in OSS
summary
Designers remain scarce in FLOSS and many burn out; mentoring boosts contributor numbers by removing entry friction. Practical tactics: kick off discussions and run needs‑finding workshops, write scoped issues, review work and submit small PRs, pair on contributions and publish documentation. Worked across projects like Ushahidi, Mozilla, Open Food Network and OpenStreetMap, showing that mentored designers actually land usable UI and docs changes. Calls for funded fellowships (GSoC/Outreachy style), employer time allocation, and a shared resource hub (bit.ly/osdmentoring).
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:14Who am I
- 4:45Why do designers care about OSS
- 6:54Open Source Software
- 9:46Questions from Designers
- 16:59Mentoring Processes
- 19:06Burnout
- 24:23Improving Mentoring
- 26:21Paying it Forward
- 26:56Resources Documentation
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