Open Source design has a plethora of hurdles to leap before it could become fully adopted by the global design community. Exploitative ‘work for free attitudes’, workflows and how design functions/roles connect up through a product life cycle, how our software doesn’t yet allow for robust and collaborative versioning across different designers and how the open source community as a whole, is over represented by those with privilege, access and ability.

Ushahidi builds humanitarian tools, remotely for some of the most marginalised people across the globe. To tackle these systemic problems with how to ‘open source’ a design effort and bring the community along with the, ‘on-staff’ Ushahidi designers, we’ve been piloting a series of design jams on our crisis communication tool TenFour with our partners Designit and Adobe. Together, we’re looking to solve the problems with how open source design can work by engaging through meaningful technology that makes a difference in the world.

We’re here to take you through that journey.