10 UXDERS, 10 QUESTIONS, 10 WEEKS

Week 10, Working with open source: 10 UXDers, 10 questions, 10 weeks

PatternFly Team

Published in

PatternFly

9 min readDec 8, 2021

The title card for this week’s question, “Can you share three tips for others looking to contribute to or work with open source projects?” featuring headshots of all 10 contributors.

We Flyers might be biased, but we think open source is pretty great. Whether you’re a PatternFly community member, a member of another open source project, or someone thinking about joining one, this week’s article is full of helpful advice to make the most of your open source involvement.

What tips do you have for making open source contributions?

Wes: Research Operations Coordinator

I don’t believe I have any real experience contributing to open source products or projects in a traditional sense, with the research we generate. For me, what it means to be open source is that philosophy from Red Hat: Open yourself. Listen to everyone. Engage with different functions and communities.

Something I’ve been trying to do just in my personal life and work life is making connections and engagement when I see something that makes me laugh, or something that I have a comment about, with no goal other than to make my opinion or thoughts known. Give them thumbs up, give them good feedback, because I think everybody is trying to figure out if what we’re doing is the right choice, whether or not it’s related to work. It’s the small things that we contribute back.

I think for the longest time, people were thinking that they’re just one person, just one user, one person in the audience. And that’s technically true, but you might be one of 80% of people who feel the same way, and you, by clicking that button, can maybe help contribute to a change in a product.

Contribute to something that you appreciate or make a contribution to something you consume. Give that feedback! That might sound a little selfish coming from a research background, but don’t be afraid to give a rating on something, and be truthful about it. You’re contributing a thought to a community, and that helps to foster and grow that Don’t hold back. But be nice.

Beau: Principal UX Designer

1.Everybody should attend some community meetings. Just find an open source project that you think is interesting or you support and attend their upstream community events. Ideally, you attend a few of them so you get a sense of momentum of how they work.

If you can get to a point where you can present some UX, I have found that the audience at a community meeting is incredibly open minded to UXer contributions. Probably more so because it isn’t so business driven. When you get to a Red Hat product, you have to figure out businesswise how it makes sense. But when you’re at a community level, it’s a little bit more: How can we idealistically make the best product? That’s when UX really shines. You don’t have to justify to the business that this thing is gonna cost X amount of money. For the community, if it’s a big enough open source project, you can just go to the GitHub repository, or wherever things are stored and people contribute. Usually, you’ll be able to find information about how you can contribute and attend those community meetings. Contributing to PatternFly is a perfect example.

2. Every commercial product probably has an open source equivalent. If you work at a company, you can use your analysis, research, and what you’ve learned from that work to see what they’re doing in open source in your space. One of the products I work on is the CodeReady Workspace, and Eclipse Che is the upstream, open source version of that.

3. There’s a whole Git process when you contribute to open source. For example, everything you use for PatternFly is in the GitHub repo. You go through the process of pushing code up, and it has to get approved.

Roxanne: Associate Manager, User Experience Design

Let’s make the assumption you found a project you like. If they have any sort of public forum, online forums, whether it’s on Twitter or an email mailing list, raise your voice. Get involved, volunteer. Let people know who you are and where you think your strengths are, and offer to help where you can. Get familiar with the active contributors in the community and see how you can ally with them. Take time to get to know the open source project and its history. There’s a lot of passionate people and a lot of passionate history with some of these projects. Knowing what you’re stepping into will help you navigate any particular open source project. In my experience, people love it when other passionate people go and contribute. No need to be shy. Don’t hold back too much.

Alan: Senior Director, User Experience Design

You have to be willing to put yourself and your work out there in the open. For designers this might be a natural extension of design critiques and presentations that designers are used to in college. Be willing and able to take your designs and put them on GitHub, or publish them through another format. Learn how to share.
Don’t feel proprietary, and don’t take comments on a design personally. The goal of putting it out there is to get comments and to modify things!
Don’t feel like things are ever finished. As a designer, if you feel like a design is finished, you’re not going to take others’ input very well. The reality is, things are never done — we’re trying to continuously optimize for people based on feedback.

Matt: Principal Interaction Designer

1.For some people, shifting from proprietary to open source work is really hard. I come from the opposite of an open source background, very proprietary. Red Hat is the first open source company I’ve worked at. Open source is culturally driven by technology and engineering, which I’m comfortable with because I’m an engineer and I understand engineers. But it was hard for me at first, because I was used to always looking for who was taking the lead. In other companies I worked for, understanding who that person was, was very important. If I could influence that person, then I could influence the whole team. Open source projects don’t have a top-down culture like that. There are still key players and key people that are viewed as leaders, but it’s much more distributed.

2. Flexibility is key, because open source has a lot of voices and a lot of opinions. Very rarely is there a follow-the-leader type mindset. Don’t expect one person to articulate, “Here’s the plan, here’s what we’re doing.”

3. Respect and appreciate transparency. I’ve never worked for a company that’s so transparent about how decisions are made and why we’re making certain choices. It’s not what I’m used to. I’m used to a culture more like, “Okay, here’s what we’re doing. Don’t ask me questions.”

That level of transparency and openness is encouraged and embraced in this culture, so try to integrate that to the extent you can in your own work. There are certainly a lot of challenges with open source, but I feel like it’s a lot more of a, “Hey, we’re laying all our cards on the table. And if you don’t like what I’m doing, you can tell me about it,” culture.

Joe: UX Developer

Find a project you like and start small. Do your research, know the background on the project, really any background information that you should know to make an informed contribution. Then start small. Start with viewing the issues list on GitHub. Begin working on some of them to get your name out there before you start contributing something more essential. Grow bigger and bigger contributions over time. Eventually, you can be a supreme contributor, own the entire project, and then finally rule the world.

Communicate with the folks who are actively involved in the project. You can’t just analyze the data on GitHub; you need to have discussions with other contributors. Often, developers omit details in a bug or story description by accident, but when you start a discussion, that may unlock certain details that were previously unknown, and will change your entire perspective.

Shiri: Senior Interaction Designer

If you want to contribute to open source, you have to be really enthusiastic about the things that you’re about to do, because it’s kind of like volunteer work. Find something you’re excited about and use your creativity. Find examples of some open source work and try to figure out what you would do in that example. Try to pull out the good stuff and the bad stuff, then make it better.

Marie: Interaction Designer

Don’t be afraid to contribute. Nobody will judge you. Choose an open source project you’re really interested in. You should enjoy it and not just survive through the process. And I also think that you should connect with the members or owners of the project, just chat with them. Be curious. Ask a lot of questions.

I have a really good example. I got an email some weeks ago about someone from a bank, cloud engineering. And their team is using PatternFly, but they don’t want to access the library and a template file from the Sketch cloud because of some security issues on their site. He asked me if I could do something with it, so that they could get access to it anyway. So I uploaded our library and template file to GitHub. It helped them a lot, and he made some reviews of the content on the GitHub page. He created a pull request for it, and I merged it. So that was really nice.

Allie: Senior Interaction Designer

I have one main tip: If you’ve never contributed to an open source project, PatternFly is a great place to start, especially when it comes to open source design. In general, explore open source projects, find one you’re interested in, and see if there are any issues marked for beginners. If not, reach out to somebody involved and be proactive that way!

Something like PatternFly is great if you’re a student, in college, switching roles, or looking for a way to gain skills without an official internship.

Margot: Interaction Designer

If somebody outside wanted to contribute, I think PatternFly would be a great place to start. I’m sure you could also Google open source projects to see what you can contribute to openly. Either way, I would pick a project you can contribute to, and see if you can contribute a design, code, or whatever you want to do. For example, if you wanted to contribute to PatternFly, you could contribute code as a developer, or a new component design as a designer.

That’s a wrap on our 10-week interview series! Thank you to our 10 UXDers for connecting with us to share their experiences and expertise. We had a great time interviewing and learning from you, and we hope our readers have, too!