Open design
Designing in public: what changes about the process, what it costs, and how licensing actually works here.
Most design happens behind a login: a Figma file, a few stakeholders, a reveal. Open design does not. The work in progress is public, the reasoning is public, and the output is licensed for anyone to use.
This guide is made that way, and so are the standards it cites. If you are contributing to this guide or to a BSV standard, this is how the work is done.
What actually changes
You write more than you draw
A screen with no explanation is a decoration in an open process, because the people who decide whether it ships are not in the room with you. The argument travels, not the artboard.
Do
Publish the reasoning with the design: what problem, what you ruled out, what you are unsure about. The last one gets the most useful replies.
Critique arrives early and from strangers
Someone who has run a BSV merchant integration for two years may tell you why your flow fails on a till with no internet. That is the whole benefit, and it only works if the work is visible before it is finished.
Do
Share at the stage where the shape is clear and the details are not. Perfect work invites compliments; rough work invites help.
Don't
Treat a repository as a portfolio. Something polished, final and unexplained gets no engagement, which is the one thing it needed.
Decisions need a written record
In a company the reason lives in somebody's head. In the open, a decision with no written reason gets relitigated every six months by somebody new, and there is no one to adjudicate.
Do
Record why, not just what, somewhere the next person will find it. A paragraph in a pull request is enough.
Nobody decides for you
There is no design director. A proposal advances because it is argued for and implemented, which means the work of persuading is part of the work rather than an overhead on top of it.
What it costs
Worth knowing before you start:
- It is slower. Consensus takes longer than a decision.
- It is public when it goes badly. A bad idea is visible, and so is changing your mind.
- Credit is diffuse. Work gets absorbed and reused without attribution more often than not.
- Unpaid work goes unpaid. Open design is not a route to income by itself, and pretending otherwise does nobody a favour.
Licensing
Licensing is what makes the work reusable rather than merely visible, and it is easy to get wrong by not thinking about it.
In this ecosystem the usual arrangement is:
- Code under a permissive licence. MIT and Apache-2.0 are common; the Open BSV License is the one written for this ecosystem, permissive on the same terms with one condition added, that the work stays with the BSV Blockchain.
- Text under a permissive or Creative Commons licence.
- Artwork under Creative Commons, commonly CC BY 4.0, which asks only for attribution.
This guide is itself an example. What was made for it is © BSV Association under the Open BSV License Version 6. The artwork it has not yet replaced is somebody else's, CC BY 4.0, and stays that way: a licence you choose applies to your own work, never to what you borrowed. Both are set out on the credits page.
The trap in relicensing
CC BY lets you build on somebody's work and publish the result under your own terms. It does not let you add conditions to their files. So a project adopting a licence with a field-of-use condition, as the Open BSV License has, keeps the borrowed material on its original terms and says which is which. Getting this backwards is a common licensing mistake, and hard to undo later.
Do
State the licence on anything you publish, and keep the attribution on anything you reuse. A file with no licence is one nobody can safely build on.
Don't
Reuse artwork without checking what its licence asks for. "It was on the internet" is not a licence, and CC BY costs you one line of credit.
Where the work happens
- Repositories hold the current state and its history. Changes are proposed as pull requests and argued in the open. This guide's repository is open on request until it is public; see Contribute.
- Standards are proposed and discussed in public. The BRC documents this guide cites were written that way, which is why they can be read and disagreed with.
- Chat and calls are where the thinking happens before anything is written down, and the reason to write it down afterwards.
Getting started in it
The useful first contribution is almost never a redesign. It is:
- pointing out something that is wrong, with the page and the reason
- answering a question somebody asked
- taking one small unfinished thing and finishing it
Recommendation
Pick a page you know something about, find one sentence that is wrong or unclear, and open an issue naming the page and the sentence. That is a complete, useful contribution and it takes ten minutes.
Related
Written from: the BRC process, open-source design practice.
Checklist
The rules on this page, in a form you can work through.
7 rules