Community design practices

#1

I’m a little bit focused on practices and tools, because I think to some extent trying to design tech communities is like trying to design a party. Once you’ve dimmed the lights, turned on the music and the disco ball, and put out the chips’n’dip, it’s really up to everyone who turns up how the party will play out from hour to hour.

I’m very inspired by the permaculture movement. There is a whole suite of group design practices that can be used when a community is creating a permaculture design for their land. I think there’s a lot to be gained from adapting such practices, to involve more people in designing the UI they will use.

CoTech (tech co-op in the US, not the UK one) have done stuff like this, as have others, and it seems to work well. The folks working on designing free code for public service agencies in the US (18f?) talk about this too. No doubt there are other examples.

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#2

Yes, this is a very interesting subject. Would you like to make this thread a list, collecting resources?

PS. I linked in chat to a great toot thread by Adam Greenfield, on the concept of Conviviality as a means to create something more than fragmented initiatives. Also on this forum are some references to “gardening” as an idea for creating collaborative environments at scale, that fit to grassroots movements.

#3

Good idea. On that note, I was at the NZOSS monthly meetup tonight and some mentioned PenPot. Seems very relevant to Social Coding:

Design systems, components, interactive prototypes, feedback loop and pixel perfect designs come together in an extremely intuitive and powerful web user interface that opens up the design process to all stakeholders.

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