Open Design Manifesto

OPEN DESIGN MANIFESTO FOR LIMESURVEY 2

1. Concentrate on your special sauce

95% of a product is non-differentiating. 5% is the special sauce.

Don’t reinvent the 95%. Concentrate on the 5%.

2. Build community without destroying individualism

The user’s experience and interaction with LimeSurvey 2 is a significant portion of the 5% special sauce. For the core design (the 95% infrastructure), leverage the global creative community for common design elements and solutions. Leverage the millions of eyes in both the customer community and the design team beyond our version 2 product to identify the best solution.

Global eyes on design.

The Open Design Rule Set

• Choose a license and distribution model (for LS2: GPL).
• Set your ideas free: publish your designs on SourceForge, LimeSurvey forums, and design.limesurvey.org. Technical implementation is essential.
• Release early and often. The rapid evolution and exchange of ideas is key to solving complex problems.

Open Design:

• Builds community without destroying individualism
• Negotiates decisions between technical, cultural, and style factors
• Involves everyone as equals: designers, engineers, architects, project managers, customers
• Uses the collective experience to create better goods and services

This is the survival of the fittest: the best designs win.

Elegant, beautiful designs grow, evolve and prosper.

Shit design withers.

Evolve or perish.

Open Design Mission

Our designs (patterns, scripts, graphics, ideas, docs) will be available to any designer, to any engineer, to any world citizen, to use and modify without restriction.

by Juhan Sonin, juhan@limesurvey.org

Draft 2, 24.Jun.08