How to keep and make productive libre graphics projects?

We need many types of people:

• programmers
• designers
• UX experts
• project managers
• journalists
• technical writers
• event organizers
• etc.

Need to better communicate that these skills are needed and show folks how they can get involved. Instead, main sites (Gimp, Scribus, InkScape) focus on downloading and documentation, and a few links. On Gimp they do a bit better with the get involved.
Also after folks download there is an opportunity to connect with them that we don’t use.

Enthusiasm is important! It is a resource.

Practical examples…

• Fedora set a goal: One new contributor every three monthsTactic: Bi-Weekly Bounty with a prize, competing for inclusion (access to subversion)“Fedora Design Bounty Ninja #3”
• Another tactic: “Build it” eventPremise: There are folks who want to get involved but don’t know how. Ran it for Vidalia and Gimp, advertised through Twitter and blogs. Make contributing more fun.
• Talk: “Debian for shy people” = Making contributing suck less. Used a mentors list. People upload patches but 10% of emails are unanswered. If mentors put in more time reviewing packages that would help. So set goal to reply to all emails within four days. Even if just to say sorry no-one has been able to review your package. Respect contributors. So then more folks starting stepping up and percentage of unanswered emails went down.
• PiTiVi: There are a lot of bugs… huge list. New contributors may have difficulty prioritizing. So wrote a wiki page highlighting low-hanging fruit. Indicate level of difficulty. Needs to be managed by hand. Makes it easier to get new contributors involved.
• Gimp… Use this page to direct new folks who are interested in contributing: gegl.org/contribute.html

Discussion snippets…

• Nurture your own enthusiasm for outreach. Don’t put a lot into caring when others are not.
• Never talk about how much you hate doing _______________. Say nothing rather than mean things. Some folks on your list may actually like doing these things.
• Sometimes better to reach out to smaller groups, one to ten people.
• Find a not-intimidating way to show people what it is like to be a contributor.
• One idea may be to copy-paste relevant parts of a wiki or FAQ page instead of just sending folks to this page. More personal touch. Then can send to the whole page.
• Bart Kelsey: Let folks make friends, hang out, get involved. If you are too task-oriented at first you may scare folks away. Let them care about the project first. (opengameart.org)
• This is what “Built it” events are supposed to do. To show what life is like as a contributor.
• Run events with concrete time periods. Make them fun and not intimidating.
• You could create a style book on how to respond to folks. Example: Use the person’s name because right away recognize as an individual. Wiki has helped us a lot. Then you can through the volume at them. Good for complex questions. Ask after if it was useful. Phrase responses in a way that are welcoming. Remember to be people-friendly.
• Ask what works and what doesn’t in documentation. That is really important.
• IRC channel or mailing list. When folks come in and ask a question the first answer is ‘read the FAQ’ — can be okay… but think about why you’re answering that way.  Be friendly. If it is two sentences then just answer directly.
• Issue for FAQ is that understanding of English varies a lot. We ask folks if they’ve understood.
• Being welcoming and inclusive. Issue with getting women involved. Sometimes unintentional. Cultural. Folks don’t realize how they come across. Resource for reaching out to women: adainitiative.org.
• See community anti-patterns video for fail stories
• Also found similar issues with shy men | south asians | insert other group here…
• Debian does specific outreach. Lots of diversity sources in free and open software. Bigger issue is exclusion in general.
• Scribus: Women users. But on the programming side only one woman.
• Hard to get non-hackers up to speed on your project quickly.
• Suggested strategy: When you are on an IRC channel the person assumes you don’t care about them. So what can you do to show them that you care about them? We have to do things and take actions that show folks that we care.

OpenHatch created a set of cool training missions to teach folks how to contribute to opensource software projects. Looks awesome — can’t wait to try it out!

Oh yes there is. Here is the a video on imposition folding. Wow.

ginger coons

Produced using all libre software. Show what can be produced with open software. Print several hundred to a few thousand conferences four times a year. Distribute at conferences, to students, and sell to cover costs. Issue 1.1 was released in November 2010. Issue zero was produced in May 2010 — in three days!

The magazine serves

• Designers and artists who are ‘like us’ — to connect them
• The F/LOSS-curious designers and artists, to raise awareness
• Software developers (and folks who establish standards and processes) to show them what folks do with their work

Feels like a design magazine. Not a tutorial or showcase or how-to magazine, addressees discourse and design issues. Shows off excellent work. High design values. Collaborative and iterative. Important step in showing how to produce print with a F/LOSS workflow.

All-proprietary tools, in long view, are a blip on the radar.

Have an ISSN, on worldcat.

Wins

• Featured on Boing Boing
• Supported by larger Linux and hacky geeky community

Challenges

• Funding (supported with advertising, subscriptions, donations)
• Getting contributions
• Sticking to production schedules (like any publication!)
• Being taken seriously

See video of ginger giving a similar talk at FOSDEM.

Ana Carvalho

Design choices and workflow.

Inspired by Emigre, Eye. Also looked at Linux Magazine.

Layout guided by Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. Use a six-column grid with eight rows. Careful about details.

Workflow: Took from software development version control so that could collaborate with distributed team and have a central repository. No separate versions all over the place. Transparent. Use Sparkleshare with Gitorious to share files (over 3BG and works great so far). Can see comments from ginger, the editor. Creates a nice timeline that others can see. Look into how decisions are made. Nice!

14-year old Python hacker in Porto’s hackspace shared a script to render images from type.

Ricardo Lafuente

Manufactura Independente design studio. Getting used to libre methodologies. Four years now have been only using F/LOSS software.

We wanted our own typeface. Not much time to design from scratch. Took something that existed — NotCourier Sans, by OSP — and hacked it a bit with FontForge. A monospace font and updated the spacing to make it proportional. Call it PropCourier Sans. Improve the font with every issue so it evolves gradually (kerning, spacing, punctuation, etc.). Example: Used a python script to import spacing from another font that had already figured out the fine details.

Google web fonts — Good place to learn about type on the web. Get a demo via font previewer. Creates code to embed into style sheets.

Traditionally type design very collaborative. Then got more individual. Now going back to more collaborative. Uses launchpad as bug tracker. We can file bugs (e.g. Nate ____, News Cycle).

Open Baskerville. Use github to manage and collaborate. Can view font source code. Can watch modifications in real time. Can fork the font if we want. This was not possible before: make a copy, modify. Check out license to see what is okay. Opening up and demystifying process of creating a font.

OSP Foundry. Some cool fonts. They are also running a git server where you can pull latest files. Get access to source code.

How can we help this movement?

Fabricatorz project: Open Clip Art Library. Idea of doing this for fonts.

Now re-launching….. the OPEN FONT LIBRARY. Yippeeeeee! Version 0.2

You can:

• Load font files
• See language availability/support
• Identify ways to contribute or provide feedback
• Search by license
• Take each font for a test drive
• Check out the wiki (need volunteers to edit content and move it to the guidebook)
• Submit bugs via Launchpad
• Will show version history (inspired by github)

All fonts are available under a free license (SIL Open Font, GNU, CC0), which are embedded in the metadata.

Want to get people to upload and use fonts, join community, get on mailing list, provide feedback.

This week I’m attending the sixth annual LGM — Libre Graphics Meeting — in Montreal. LGM gives software developers, artists, designers, and other graphics professionals the opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other. The meeting emphasizes the collaboration, innovation, and ideas— and it’s FREE to attend. Yippppee!

Libre graphics software — like GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, the Open Clipart Library, and the Open Font Library — are important to Artefatica as a open publishing project. We want to make open books with open tools. More broadly, I find it exciting to think of a set of tools for self-expression and self-publishing that are available for anyone, anywhere.

You can support LGM and keep the conference free by donating via Pledgie.

The theme is open culture. We are going to talk open education, open web, web standards, licensing and the change that occurred on the internet, open publishing, open culture, remixing, video, DJing, and food. Here’s the lineup:

The point? To raise awareness about Creative Commons, especially among content creators — writers, artists, musicians, photographers, you name it. And to lay the foundation for ongoing, semi-annual events. Keep the party going :)

Thanks to our event sponsors:

This was the first time I ever submitted anything to an academic conference (see PDF of call for papers), so I was thrilled that we were selected. Here’s what caught my eye:

A renewed emphasis on participatory forms of digitally-mediated production is transforming our social landscape. ‘Making’ has become the dominant metaphor for a variety of digital and digitally-mediated practices. The web is exploding with independently produced digital ‘content’ such as video diaries, conversations, stories, software, music, video games — all of which are further transformed and morphed by “modders,” “hackers,” artists, and activists… Many of these individuals and collaborators understand their work to be socially interventionist. Through practices of design, development, and exchange they challenge traditional divides between production and consumption and to redress the power differentials built into technologically-mediated societies.

You can download all of the abstracts. Here’s ours. So little, yet so much sweat in here:

The Roerich Garden Project, a collaborative landscape-scale artwork instigated by artist Emily Rose Michaud, was created in 2007 to provoke dialogue about the future of lot #2334609 — known locally as the Maguire Meadow or simply le champ — one of the last undeveloped spaces in Montreal’s Mile End. The project also documents community uses of the meadow and explores concepts of public space, citizen participation, and the open city.

The Roerich symbol was originally used during World War II to protect buildings of historic, scientific, or cultural significance from aerial bombing. The garden in lot #2334609 is a 312-square foot living Roerich symbol made up of plants, rocks, and mulch, and maintained year-round over a period of three years by Sprout Out Loud! — a gardener’s ensemble borne from the project — with the help of neighbors and friends.

The project’s efforts sparked change: Citizens gathered, defined their priorities and dreams, and the city’s $9-million “development” plan is now under closer community scrutiny. A new nonprofit, Les Amis du Champ des Possibles (Friends of the Field of Possibilities), has been created to preserve the field and to raise awareness about the cultural, ecological, and social importance of wild urban spaces.

The Roerich Garden Project and the activities surrounding it are documented online at roerichproject.artefati.ca through a growing collection of more than 40 texts and 500 images, all distributed under a Creative Commons license. A book will soon follow, and subsequent editions will incorporate shifting community stories and perspectives. Visit roerichproject. artefati.ca to explore and learn more.

You can see all of the images we’ve gathered so far on Flickr. And the book is coming along, slowwwwwllly (we all, after all, have dayjobs!). Our tenacity is paying off. The first layouts are really beautiful. I was touched. One of those examples of where people together can create something beyond what we can do alone.

Laurence emailed me a few weeks ago to let me know that Arefatica is featured in the Fall 2009 issue of Maisonneuve. I knew it was going to be published, but had forgotten all about it. It’s a nice piece. Wish I could edit it a bit just to adjust the way I said some stuff and to add what I’ve figured out since Sarah and I spoke. But, well, so be it. Sarah was already a champ — letting me see the piece before it went to print. It starts off like this…

Having spent years working in communications for international development projects, Christine Prefontaine had long suspected that there was more to be gained than lost from sharing ideas, or even from having them stolen. Not only did sharing seem to solve problems more quickly, but it also raised the profile of the idea’s originator. And it wasn’t ideas that ensured success, she reasoned, but the ability to come up with them — something nobody could steal.

Kinda like how it connects my work work with Artefatica, my just-for-love project. Nice to get feedback and attention!

Artefatica is coming along. Sooooo slowly. The draft of the website for our first book —  Terrain Vague, Citizen Engagement & the Open City: The Roerich Garden Project — is up! Check it out, send some feedback, add your story or your vision. We’ve started a Flickr collection to pull together photos for the book, and imagine (le) mile-end has created a group.

If you’d like to contribute to the preservation of the garden as a wild space Emily posts community updates on her blog. And imagine (le) mile-end has been doing lots of great organizing. Here’s their report from their June 2009 meeting. You can find more on the Champ des Possibles (Field of Possibilities) website.

From the introduction:

Lot #2334609 is a terrain vague — owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway, owned by the City of Montreal as of June 2009, used and cherished by the community, the only green space in the Mile End. People feel free in this space. They don’t ask for permission to picnic, grow things, create art, or gather around a campfire. It’s open and wild, unlike most city parks.

To outsiders, it may look like an abandoned field. But, as you will read here, the community has appropriated this space and wants a say in how it will be developed. Development is scheduled for 2009-2010, as part of the city’s $9-million revitalization of the neighborhood.

Emily Rose Michaud, through the Sprout Out Loud! gardener’s collective, created the Roerich Garden project in November 2007. Using this project as a starting point, this book provides a history of the meadow and documents the many ways the community uses and relates to this space. It then connects what’s happening in the Mile End to similar local, national, and international initiatives. It documents what the community wants for this space, as captured through a series of participatory consultations. And it asks questions about how we engage as citizens to imagine and create more open cities.

If you’d like to get (infrequent) updates about this project and the book you can sign up.

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Terrain vague, engagement citoyen & ville ouverte: le projet du jardin Roerich

Artefatica est en route. Lentement mais sûrement! Le site web pour notre premier livre est maintenant en ligne: Terrain Vague, Citizen Engagement & the Open City: The Roerich Garden Project. Allez le visiter, ajoutez-y vos impressions, votre histoire, votre vision… Nous avons débuté une collection sur Flickr, afin de mettre toutes ensemble les photos pour le livre. imagine (le) mile-end y a aussi créé un groupe.

Si vous vous sentez appelé à participer à la préservation du jardin en tant qu’espace sauvage, suivez les mises à jour sur le blog d’Émily. imagine (le) mile-end s’occupe aussi de l’organisation: Vous pouvez vous rendre sur leur site où vous trouverez le rapport provenant de la rencontre du 29 juin dernier, ainsi que sur le site du Champ des Possibles.

Tiré de l’introduction:

Le Lot #2334609 est un terrain vague qui appartient à la Ville de Montréal depuis Juin 2009 (il appartenait anciennement au Canadien Pacifique), utilisé et chéri par la communauté du Mile-End puisqu’il est le seul espace vert du quartier. Les gens s’y sentent libres. Ils n’ont pas à demander la permission pour y pic-niquer, y faire pousser des trucs, s’y laisser inspirer pour créer des œuvres d’art ou pour s’y réunir autour d’un feu. C’est un espace ouvert et sauvage, contrairement aux autres parcs montréalais.

Pour les étrangers au champs, ce dernier peut ressembler à un terrain abandonné. Cependant, comme vous le découvrirez ici, la communauté s’est approprié cet espace et exige un droit de parole quant à son futur développement, inclus dans le plan 2009-2010 de la Ville pour la revitalisation du quartier (Budget: 9 millions).

À travers le collectif de jardiniers Le pouvoir aux Pousses, Emily Rose Michaud créa le projet du jardin Roerich en novembre 2007. Utilisant ce projet comme point de départ, ce livre relate l’historique du champs et documente les nombreuses façons avec lesquelles la communauté occupe cet espace et interagit avec cet espace. Il y par la suite connexion avec d’autres initiatives similaires à différentes échelles, qu’elle soit locale, nationale ou même internationale. Ce livre documente les aspirations de la communauté face à au champs, captées à travers une série de consultations participatives. Il pose aussi la question à savoir comment nous nous engageons en tant que citoyens pour imaginer et créer des villes plus ouvertes.

Pour recevoir des mises à jours (rares) sur le projet et sur le livre, vous pouvez vous inscrire ici.