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should we start a community to announce and seek contributors for open source projects? (awful.systems)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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given the absolute fucking state of the open source community in general, and the fact that hacker news of all places is where the majority of new open source projects get discovered, is there any interest in starting a community here where folks can announce and solicit for help with their open source projects?

we could possibly use NotAwfulTech, but:

I kind of want to keep self-promotion out of that community
my code is probably awful for everyone else, that's why I'm seeking contributors

let me know if anyone's down for the new community or wants to expand the scope of NotAwfulTech to include stuff like this. if you're on team new community also feel free to suggest a name

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Maybe dumb, maybe already happening. "Open source" refers to code, but it would be cool if open source was open to all kinds of contributions, like information architecture, ui design, strategy, etc. without the barrier of technical literacy. It's difficult because all of the infrastructure for managing the projects is focused on code contributions and issues are, generally, submitted in the context that they can be addressed by code.

I guess I'm saying open project instead of source

could be a governance hell, but that's life eh

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This project was in my mind when I wrote this https://openmovement.org/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

this is exactly the kind of project I’d love to collaborate on, even if it’s a bit out of my area of expertise! the first thing that came to mind when I opened the page was “huh I wonder how much of this I could make 3D printable” and now I’m tempted to try it and release STLs and nonprintable parts lists for folks to make their own watches.

the same thing applies to a wide variety of other designs — I’d love to grab a well-documented open source keyboard design and swap its circuit board out for an open source FPGA dev board and use that as a whole reconfigurable computing platform, for example

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I’m using open source as more of a term of convenience than its strict OSI definition, but regardless I feel strongly that those types of contributions should be welcomed by open source projects. a contribution absolutely doesn’t have to be code to be worthwhile, and there’s so many open source projects just dying for any design attention at all. a lot of the projects that get that kind of attention get it from corporations, which then use their position as a lever to control the direction of the project as a whole. there’s no reason it should be like this, but the more toxic elements of hacker culture make open source projects unfriendly places for most designers.