Manager Software Engineering, Community Platform Engineering (CPE) / Frankfurt - Germany
Besides managing Software engineers who support the open source community (Fedora & CentOS) I lead the Community Design Team (CDT). It is a small team dedicated to providing design services to upstream open source projects and communities. Many members of the team are also members of the Community Platform Engineering (CPE) Team. We help upstream open source projects create beautiful, usable software.
By my coffee machine - it makes amazing coffee to get me (and my brain) started.
The talent, the passion, the creativity, the dedication to open source, the open mind set, the willingness to share knowledge, the variety of challenges and& requests.
Since we are a community facing team we use open source technologies (such as Krita, Blender, Inkscape and Penpot to name a few). We rely a lot on feedback and interaction with the community and are happy to help and share the knowledge we have.
It is essential. Given that we work closely with the community we encourage them to collaborate on design work and get started on tickets. Through this collaboration we received amazing artwork and were able to scale better and faster.
Diverse voices and perspectives ensure a robust user experience catering to various needs and requirements. One alone cannot think of everything but with multiple perspectives we strive for the best possible experience for many. “Together everyone achieves more”
Enabling the team and trying to improve our deliveries–whether improving productivity, prioritizing tasks based on the impact they may have, navigating challenges, improving processes to ensure community requirements are met, or planning ahead to anticipate needs.
Design is more than creating art. Everyone has different talents and passions. Imagine everyone brings these traits to build something great: Some are good at design, some are organizers, some can explain complex things in simple ways, etc. Combining and integrating these skill sets, feedback, and people to ensure the best possible user experience for everyone in a transparent (open) way–this is open design to me (in a nutshell).
“Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.” - Robert L. Peters