Mozilla Community Design Kickoff

For over 2 years now, I’ve been unofficially responsible for a lot of visual design requests in the Mozilla community. Ranging from logos to print design, I noticed there was a great need for design contributions across all Mozilla. Seeing that I was unable to facilitate so many requests on my own (and this shouldn’t happen in a community anyway), I started to mobilize various contributors around this idea, but unfortunately it didn’t took off. Until now.

 

With the help of the Participation team at Mozilla (before you ask, yes, I created the team’s logo) and Lucy Harris leading the efforts from the staff side, we were finally able to gather a great number of people (volunteers and staff) to join the project.

The result was highly inspirational: 27 Mozillians attended the first Community Design call, among them Design, UX and Creative Leads from across various teams at Mozilla. I was humbled to be part of the core efforts which once inspired me to join Mozilla. It is truly astonishing what can be achieved once the community chimes in. If you were unable to attend the call, you can watch the recording of the call on AirMozilla :

Workflow

But enough with TED-like inspirational enthusiasm. I want to briefly present to you how Community Design is going to work in the coming months (with improvements always being welcome).

We will be using GitHub to process requests and discussions related on them. Contributors and staff can file them and everyone who wishes to take them over can do so very easily. This allows for a quick contribution path for new contributors in a decentralized manner.  Different labels determine what kind of context issues have, neatly sorted in UX, IX, UI and general Graphic Design, to allow contributors from various backgrounds to jump in.

Discourse will allow discussions to take place in an accessible manner, allowing everyone to chime in if they wish to do so. As of now, we are using Telegram for instant messaging, this is however more casual and not an official communication channel. Please feel free to join however!

You can go also through the presentation slides if you want to find out more about everything Community Design.
Furthermore, check out the meeting notes of the first call.

If you wish to be part of the initiative and get included in our calls and similar notifications, please sign up on our Community Design Form:
mzl.la/community-design

Thank you

Special thanks to Lucy Harris, who has been tirelessly motivating me and driving the efforts to get this going. Her help has been critical to kick off Community Design. Thanks also to Rosana Ardila, Program Manager of Mozilla Reps, who has been supporting me in the early days of Community Design. Locally, FLOSS-ie and Mozilla Rep Redon Skikuli has been a great support helping me envision how to combine both of my passions: open source and design. Thank you!

Last but not least, a huge thanks goes also to the Open Source Design organization, about which I found out only 8 months ago. It’s great meeting like minded people!

That’s all folks. For more see you in the next Community Design call or on GitHub (file an issue)!