How Design Thinking could boost open source projects like Gnome

GNOME News 03.09.2010 15:30 it is now a few weeks that GUADEC’2010 in The Hague is over. We are still very glad that we could take part at this great conference and introduce Design Thinking to the Gnome community through and a . Moreover, we were very happy about the great feedback we got from the participants, like , , , , , , and . Also you might want to check our Photo Album on the web at . Yet, what is left after those three conference Workshops and how can Design Thinking actually help the Gnome project? Already during GUADEC and in the days after the conference, back at the inventedhere homebase in Berlin, we thought a lot about these and similar questions. One thing seems clear: Workshops–executed in a Design Thinking manner–are a big win for Gnome-related conferences and probably even beyond that. As the community is spread all over the globe Workshops like these are great facilitators, bringing people together, working on problems and actually coming up with very specific results. Additionally, it seemed that the cultural probes in form of real user statements came as eye-openers for many participants. Moreover we felt that those workshops simply helped establishing a relationship between the participants through a very intense shared experience. Also it was a great way to bring people with different expertise and backgrounds together. In our workshop we had great teams consisting of developers, designers, users and translators for instance. Applying this format of Workshops to Hackfests could also be very potent as the Design Thinking process helps to keep people on track and focused on what is important. Our team would be more than happy to help planning an upcoming Hackfest in such a manner and thus making it more efficient and fun. Especially when user needs come into play, Design Thinking shows its biggest strength through the identification of users’s latent needs and early testing and evaluation which are part of the iterative process and not a nuisance at the very end of it. Women's Dinner at GUADEC 2010 Two of our coaches had another interesting experience at the first women’s dinner at GUADEC . Sophia and Andrea attended the dinner. Only a few women are involved in Gnome and present at GUADEC. Thanks to those women on the picture they experienced a lot of passion and excitement from women of the Gnome community. This spirit needs to be kept up and spread to others. It would make up an interesting Design Challenge which could be phrased like that: How might we get more women involved in the GNOME community? In a Design Thinking process this question would be narrowed down based on genuine insights and then solved in a an iterative fashion. We would be glad to continue the conversation, be it through , our blog, E-Mail , twitter or . We just started our Ideation Engines – but as Design Thinkers we can’t think in the void. We are depending on your early feedback.

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