By Erik Albers (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons
Two weeks ago we had Silva Arapi to join our team as our new communications manager. Silva has been a member of Open Labs Hackerspace in Tirana for the last two years and she has been contributing for different open source projects, so we were pleased to welcome on board someone who knows and believes in the open source ethics.
Since she was going to attend the SHA2017 Hacker Camp in the Netherlands, this was a great opportunity for her to also meet people from the Open Source Design community and people from other open source projects we’ve been working with.
For those of you who haven’t heard of SHA before: this is an outdoor hacker camp which took place in the Netherlands on August 4th to 8th and was the successor of similar events which have been taking place every 4 years and thousands of visitors have been joining it. Thousands of activists,free-thinkers, hackers, geeks, scientists, makers and others from all over the world joined SHA2017 to share their ideas, thoughts and knowledge, to discuss, build and hack with others.
One of the things that Silva noticed during these hacking days was the fact that people were not talking so much about design in general, which is not that much of a surprise since the event is quite technical in general. But of course, there were so many people there and she also had the chance to meet some of those who were also concerned about the design of their products and would like to meet and talk to people who are experts of the field, and having projects like Open Source Design makes it easer to show them a place were they should go and ask for advice or help.
> Still Open Source Designing Anyway!! #sha2017 #sha2017camp @SHA2017Badge pic.twitter.com/rmejAIL1YM — Ura Design (@uracreative) August 7, 2017During her days at the camp Silva had the chance to meet Victoria, a UX Researcher/Designer who is part of the Open Source Design community. Victoria told her a bit more about the the community, what the people who are part of it have been working on and what are some of their future plans. She also met Herman one of our clients who is the founder of OSSO, a company which specializes in open source infrastructure, development and operations. We have been working with them during the last months to improve the design for some of their products.
The camping days were intensive, with so many great talks, workshops and hacking sessions. Silva says that having more presence in such events by people who work with design would help in increasing awareness about the importance of good design while building technological products.
Check her blog for more details on the camp.
