Scott JensonThere is a huge untapped market of #retired technology folks. I'm curious if anyone knows of any groups the help match up tech talent with #opensource or #nonprofit organizations. Please boost for reach.
As two people seem to be confused, I'm looking at this FOR ME. I'm the retired person and I'm trying to find some places to give my time.
Thomas Thomassen@scottjenson what are you looking to do?
@onionarmy If possible, what i've done in my career: UX design. This means I'd likely be helping out small teams building solutions that don't have a UX designer.
I've been trying for years to volunteer #UX on #FOSS and #OpenSource projects but there appears to be very little interest. The community just doesn't (in general) prioritize UX. (I'm sympathetic to the stresses involved, I'm not trying to throw stones, just saying there isn't much demand)
@scottjenson indeed. I wonder if a good part of that is because UX require more coordination. Certainly plenty of open source projects could benefit from more UX reminments. I wonder if projects that have funding for people to work full time on it might amiable for UX input?
What about Open Street Maps? Lots of project within that sphere. Several related to editing the massive amount of data. (I'm looking into OSM myself, hence it came to the top of my list.)
@onionarmy I'm sure there are lots of projects, it's just hard to match up teams with the right people.
As to your point about coordination, UX, at it's core, is bout team building, creating early sketches that people discuss and supportively argue about to get a shared understanding. That type of in-your-face type of working often runs against the grain of many #OpenSource projects.
zceline@scottjenson @onionarmy One thing we found consistently is that UX often requires more than a few bite sized coding or documentation tasks or a single sprint, which is what the majority of volunteers will commit.
If a nonprofit or OSS team was ready, UX was often a highly requested skillset, & a couple of our most active contributors were senior UX people. A lot just came down to timing, not value.
PS +1 to Catchafire, Taproot, C4A, others in this thread. It's a really cool problem space...
@zceline @onionarmy I've spoken about this very issue at #FOSSBack You are exactly right, if you're only 'unit of work' is a small check in, you'll never make progress on UX issues. It's up to the 'lead' (whatever that is for your project) to prioritize UX as a roadmap issue and then coordinate a collection of smaller PRs to get to a bigger goal. There are lots of FOSS projects that are doing this very thing.
gadgetoid@scottjenson @zceline @onionarmy would it be useful to try and gather a team? Assuming little interest in UX from FOSS plus little inclination to put in the work to implement suggestions (assuming you don’t have the capacity to rewrite whole front-ends) could you gather a crack team of retirees for UX, have those meetings among yourselves, and approach a project with more significant ready-to-go changes? (Diplomatic concerns notwithstanding)
Billy SmithMight be worth getting in touch with Sensorica.
All of the work they do is #FOSS :D
Their latest project:
Rihards Olups@scottjenson
There are a lot of projects in the #OpenStreetMap ecosystem - maybe somebody will see this and offer a collaboration.
Haven't had the chance to read all replies, sorry if this is a duplicate suggestion.