Design in Open Source

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

Since August last year, together with Leisa Reichelt, I’ve been involved in work­ing with the Drupal com­munity. Firstly, on the redesign of drupal.org, and more recently, over­haul­ing the user exper­i­ence of the soft­ware itself. All of which was done openly, and in close part­ner­ship with the Drupal com­munity. Recently, the ques­tion of the prac­tice of good design (and by design, I mean the kind of design I do, not soft­ware design) has once again arisen in the open source com­munity. From Linux to Moz­illa, Drupal to Word­Press, this is a ques­tion that keeps bub­bling to the surface.

I’ve only recently been involved in open source through the Drupal pro­ject although I’ve been a mem­ber of many com­munit­ies online, going back to 1995 or so, but none so pas­sion­ate as the Drupal com­munity. Hon­estly, it astounds me–almost daily–of the ded­ic­a­tion and com­mit­ment many of the mem­bers of this com­munity show to their pro­ject. But that’s the pos­it­ive side. It’s under­stand­able, then, with so much pas­sion fly­ing around, that there are fre­quent heated debates. I’ve had my fair share of these over the past year. One debate, admit­tedly instig­ated by me, happened on Thursday and has, once again, cre­ated ripples in the Drupal pond.

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