User Experience (UX) + Free Software = ❤

ChRIS / Conferences / Interaction Design / Open Source RockingLeave a comment

Today I gave a talk at DevConf.cz, which I previously gave as a keynote this past November at SeaGL, about UX and Free Software using the ChRIS project as an example. This is a blog-formatted version of that talk, although you can view a video of it here from SeaGL if you’d rather a video. Let’s talk about a topic that is increasingly critical as time goes on, that is really important for those of us who work on free software and care really deeply about making a positive impact in the world. Let’s talk about user experience (UX) and free software, using the ChRIS Project as a case study. What is the ChRIS Project? The ChRIS project is an open source, free software platform developed at Boston Children’s Hospital in partnership with other organizations – Red Hat (my employer,) Boston University, the Massachusetts Open Cloud, and others. The overarching goal of the ChRIS project is to make all of the amazing free software in the medical space more accessible and usable to researchers and practitioners in the field. This is just a quick peek under the hood – because I’m saying ChRIS is a “platform,” but it can be …

Fedora Design Team Sessions Live: Session #1

artwork / Design Team / FedoraLeave a comment

As announced in the Fedora Community Blog, today we had our inaugural Fedora Design Team Live Session 🙂 Thanks for everyone who joined! I lost count at how many folks we had participate, we had at least 9 and we had a very productive F35 wallpaper brainstorming session! Here’s a quick recap: 1. fedora.element.io background image thumbnail sketches review Ticket: https://pagure.io/design/issue/705 We took a look at Madeline’s thumbnail sketches for the upcoming Fedora element.io deployment. – We looked at Mozilla’s login screen to see what they did: mozilla.element.io. -I gave a little background on the project and the concept of the initial thumbnail sketch i did with lights: the gist is users joining the chat server are in the dark foreground approaching this glowing city full of communication / vitality, and the shape/glow of the buildings skyline is meant to evoke the shape of a sound wave of a voice. – Madeline talked us through her 4 thumbnail sketches and their concepts – she made some refinements to the glowing city concept, and also riffed off of the idea with the neat buildings hanging together with the water reflection and clouds (the chat is in the cloud!), and the natural/calm …

Ag troid le coróinvíreas le foinse oscailte

ChRIS / Open Source RockingOne Comment

Tá mé ag iarraidh píosa beag a insint faoi cúpla tionscadal foinse oscáilte go mbeidh ag troid le coróinvíreas. 1. COVID-Net agus ChRIS Is bogearraí intleachta saorga é COVID-Net. Is féidir leis COVID-19 a aimsiú i íomhánna x-ghathú cliabhraigh agus i íomhánna scanadh CAT cliabhraigh. Úsáideann sé samhail meaisínfhoghlama. Tá sé ag deanamh ag comhlacht ainm atá air DarwinAI agus ag University of Waterloo. Is ardán scamaill foinse oscailte tábhachtach é ChRIS. Chruthaigh Boston Children’s Hospital é leis páirtithe is cósúil le Boston University agus Red Hat (mo fhostóir.) Ritheann COVID-Net ar ChRIS. Is féidir libh níos mo faoin COVID-Net ar ChRIS a léamh (i mBéarla) anseo: DarwinAI and Red Hat Team Up to Bring COVID-Net Radiography Screening AI to Hospitals, Using Underlying Technology from Boston Children’s Hospital Dhear mé an comhéadain úsáideora do ChRIS agus do COVID-Net. Is féidir libh an dearadh comhéadain úsáideora COVID-Net a feacáil anseo: Dearadh COVID-Net. Is tionscadail an-tairbheach iad ChRIS agus COVID-Net agus is breá liom é a bheith ag obair acu. 2. Serratus Is tionscadal foinse oscailte géineolaíocht é Serratus. Tá siad ag cuardach seichimh RNA víreasach i bunachar sonraí SRA poiblí. Nuair seichimh a aimsiú siad ann, cruthaíonn siad géanóim víreasach iomlán. …

Language is the OS that runs our thoughts

Interaction Design / Language / Uncategorized2 Comments

I think in tech, it’s really important to get as much inclusive language as we can nailed down as soon as we can. One trend I’ve seen as time has gone on is that we’re abstracting on top of abstractions further and further out. If we can clean up the base it’s all built on top of, that will hopefully mean a lot less issues moving forward as new abstractions need to be named / expressed in language. I have seen a lot of pushback against the suggestion that we actively fix some of the language in our code that could enforce old and problematic ideas. I want to talk about why these words are not so benign, and why changing them matters. Language is not a benign medium I think about language a lot – not just in working on the right terminology and phrasing for our software, which is a core part of my job as a UX designer. I also think about language from my experiences learning three languages beyond my mother tongue – Spanish, Japanese, and Irish – the latter, the language my ancestors were raised in. I would, under different circumstances, be living in Irish …

Resilience and trolls*

Design Team / Fedora / FLOSS / Suck14 Comments

Recently, two separate people called something myself and other Fedora Design Team members worked on “crap” and “shit” (respectively) on devel list, the busiest and most populous mailing list in the project. 💩💩💩 via GIPHY Actually, I’ve been around the internet a long time, and I have to say that this is an improvement in terms of the rudeness being applied towards the work specifically, and not the people! Progress! Yeah ok, but, we clearly still have a lot of work to do on basic decency. It’s not Fedora, it’s not the free and open source community, it’s not the internet – it’s people. Maybe people at a communication scale for which we’ve not quite evolved yet. Let’s talk about one way we can think about approaching this issue moving forward. (* I realize I used the term “trolls” in the title of this post, and I wouldn’t consider this scenario an intentional instance of trolling. However, this post is about a framework and not this specific scenario, so I use “trolls” as a more generic term.) What about the Code of Conduct? Codes of conduct set a baseline for expectations, and we certainly have one in Fedora. Well… I’m …

Return of the son of the panda badger

badges / Design Team / Fedora / SwagOne Comment

Personal Note: I haven’t blogged in a year! 😱 I’ve been gone for the past few months on leave, but I’ve been back for the past 3-4 weeks – no more excuses. Let’s just get back into things here! Design Team Issue: #579 Let’s bring back pandas! (sticker sheet request)   Here’s an initial mockup of a new sticker sheet design for Fedora! It features artwork from Fedora Badges. (Actually, now that I think of it, it would be nice to have a licensing notice for the artwork along the bottom or side of the sheet.) The idea behind this is just to be a fun piece of swag to give away at events. Before my leave, we produced a Fedora Diversity sticker sheet that has proven to be very popular at events, so it’s time for our panda and badger friends to have their time to shine I think 🙂   I could use feedback on the design. The magenta lines are the cutlines for the stickers – and they are very rough because I haven’t finalized them. (I’m using Inkscape’s dynamic offset feature to create them – I’m keeping them as dynamic offset paths for now so I …

Fedora logo redesign update

Fedora / Fedora Design Team / Logo Design101 Comments

As we’ve talked about here in a couple of posts now, the Fedora design team has been working on a refresh of the Fedora logo. I wanted to give an update on the progress of the project. We have received a lot of feedback on the design from blog comments, comments on the ticket, and through social media and chat. The direction of the design has been determined by that feedback, while also keeping in mind our goal of making this project a refresh / update and not a complete redesign. Where we left off Here are the candidates we left off with in the last blog post on this project: Candidate #1 Candidate #2 How we’ve iterated Here’s what we’ve worked on since presenting those two logo candidates, in detail. Candidate #2 Dropped Based on feedback, one of the first things we decided to do was to drop candidate #2 out of the running and focus on candidate #1. According to the feedback, candidate #1 is closer to the current logo. Again, a major goal was to to iterate what we had – keeping closer to our current logo seemed in keeping with that. Redesign of ‘a’ One of …

Which new Fedora logo design do you prefer?

Fedora / Fedora Design Team / Logo Design232 Comments

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Fedora design team has been working on a refresh of the Fedora logo. This work started in a Fedora design ticket at the request of the Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller, and has been discussed openly in the ticket, on the council list, on the design-team list, and within the Fedora Council including at their recent hackfest. In this post, I’d like to do the following: First, outline the history of our logo and how it got to where it is today. It’s important to understand the full context of the logo when analyzing it and considering change. I’d then like to talk about some of the challenges we’ve faced with the current iteration of our logo for the past few years, with some concrete examples. I want you to know there are solid and clear reasons why we need to iterate our logo – this isn’t something we’re doing for change’s sake. Finally, I’d like to present two proposals the Fedora Design Team has created for the next iteration of our logo – we would very much like to hear your feedback and understand what direction you’d prefer us to go …

Fedora Design Team Meeting, 4 Nollaig 2018

Design Team / Fedora / Fedora Design Team4 Comments

Today we had a Fedora Design Team meeting. Here’s what went down (meetbot link). Freenode<>Matrix.org Issues About half of the team members who participated today used matrix.org (e.g. the riot.im client). Unfortunately, we noticed an issue with bridging between these two networks today – both sides could see IRC comments, but matrix.org comments weren’t getting sent to IRC. ctmartin recognized the issue from another Fedora channel and figured out that if we added +v to the channel members using matrix, that would fix the issue. I am not sure if this is All Fixed Now or is going to be an ongoing Thing. But that is why our meeting started late today. If anybody has ideas on how to resolve this in a permanent way, I would very much appreciate your advice! Fedora 30 Artwork For 5 Fedora releases now, the design team has been using a famous scientist / mathematician / technologist as the inspiration for the release artwork. We do this based on an alphabetical system; Fedora 30 is slated to be a person whose names begins with an “F.” Gnokii manages this process, and already set up and tallied the results for the design team-specific vote on …

Intro to UX design for the ChRIS Project – Part 1

ChRIS / ChRIS / Interaction Design / Interaction Design Work / Intro to UX design for the ChRIS Project7 Comments

(This blog post is part of a series; view the full series page here.) What is ChRIS? Something I’ve been working on for a while now at Red Hat is a project we’re collaborating on with Boston Children’s Hospital, the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), and Boston University. It’s called the ChRIS Research Integration Service or just “ChRIS”. Rudolph Pienaar (Boston Children’s), Ata Turk (MOC), and Dan McPherson (Red Hat) gave a pretty detailed talk about ChRIS at the Red Hat Summit this past summer. A video of the full presentation is available, and it’s a great overview of why ChRIS is an important project, what it does, and how it works. To summarize the plot: ChRIS is an open source project that provides a cloud-based computing platform for the processing and sharing of medical imaging within and across hospitals and other sites. There’s a number of problems ChRIS seeks to solve that I’m pretty passionate about: Using technology in new ways for good.Where would we all be if we could divert just a little bit of the resources we in the tech community collectively put towards analyzing the habits of humans and delivering advertising content to them? ChRIS applies cloud …