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Designing

In a FOSS ecosystem, not designing something is often the right call. A mature community has likely already solved the problem, and deploying their solution means inheriting years of work, security audits, documentation, and ongoing maintenance — for free. The design question then becomes: does what already exists fit our need well enough? If the answer is yes, that is not a compromise. That is the point.

When something still needs to be shaped — how a service gets chosen, configured, or introduced — designing is not a formal phase. It is an ongoing conversation between the people who use the stack and the people who build it. That conversation draws on a broader field of change methodologies known as Key Enabling Methodologies (KEM).

Key enabling methodologies​

The practices below sit inside a broader landscape of change methodologies. The Key Enabling Methodologies (KEM) research agenda distinguishes eleven categories — each a collection of methods, processes, and strategies serving the same purpose:

  • Vision & Imagination (Dot on the horizon) — giving direction to change by researching, designing, and/or visualising a shared goal.
  • Participation & Co-creation (Realising change together) — involving stakeholders in an issue to jointly investigate, shape, and bring about the necessary change.
  • Behaviour & Empowerment (Control over behaviour) — bringing about change by learning to understand and influence human behaviour, or involving people in social change processes.
  • Experimental environments (Innovating through experimentation) — stimulating and shaping experiments to prepare innovations for practical application.
  • Value Creation & Scaling (Valuable change) — creating new forms of economic, social, cultural, and/or ecological value, and enabling rapid scaling of interventions.
  • Institutional Change (Working with the rules of the game) — providing insight into the effects of institutions and supporting institutional change processes.
  • System Change (Change from a systems perspective) — understanding and shaping transitions through a future-oriented, systems-oriented approach.
  • Monitoring & Impact Measurement (Measure and adjust) — monitoring the change brought about by an intervention within a system, so adjustments can be made where necessary.
  • Ethics & Responsibility (Reflective change) — reflecting on, and acting on, the ethical and moral questions that a social change or new technology brings with it.
  • Meaning & Awareness (Building bridges between complex issues and the general public) — enabling change by broadening perspective, challenging existing patterns and habits, redefining values, and critiquing systemic discomforts.
  • Data for Exploration & Substantiation (Shaping change with data) — using data to explore change issues and provide inspiration and substantiation.

What that looks like in practice​

Of these eleven, three resonate most with our values:

Imagination and visualisation — before anything gets built, designing starts with picturing something that doesn't exist yet. Opening up thinking for alternative futures is what makes the rest possible — a proposal has to be imagined before it can be proposed.

Self-organising experimentation — if something is missing, designing starts with someone trying something. An idea doesn't need central approval to become a proposal, and a proposal doesn't need a committee to become a test. What works gets kept; what doesn't gets dropped. The infrastructure is open enough to allow this without requiring gatekeeping.

Co-creation — the people who will live in a tool are also the people best placed to say whether it fits. Residents, makers, and stewards should all have a hand in shaping what gets deployed: naming the need, testing early versions, and deciding when something is good enough. Design is not done to people; it is done with them.