On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 5:55 PM, Astley Le Jasper <[email protected]> wrote: > Are there any other learning approaches might be useful in gaining > experience?
Hi Astley, One other area that is always looking for volunteers is the Open Source Software world. You mentioned working with a charity which is certainly noble. A benefit of Open Source Software is that OSS developers are more likely to give critical feedback and ultimately implement the ideas of a designer whereas a charity is unlikely to really understand your ideas to be able to critique them. And, when working on OSS you are often ultimately benefiting charity organizations. One great example is the Drupal project which is a social publishing platform that is the basis of the new IxDA.org. As we head toward the launch of the new version of IxDA.org one of the ideas we've been tossing around is how people who want to improve the experience on IxDA.org can improve the core and contributed modules of Drupal which can then be updated or deployed on IxDA.org. This way IxDA.org benefits as do all the other great organizations in the world who use Drupal (e.g. Amnesty International and Greenpeace among thousands of others). One other benefit of working on OSS is that you can point to the work you did and the value it has to the world. If you go to apply for a job and say "I improve the intranet for small charity X" that is hard for the person hiring you to evaluate. If you say "here is the public research I posted in the issue queue for the project, the discussion and refinement of the ideas, and the implementation which is now used on 10,000 websites" that can be quite compelling. Design and OSS isn't without drawbacks. There are some political/religious debates and baggage associated with the topic. Some developers are not happy to get feedback on the UI of their module. I suggest finding friendly souls in the community to help support your involvement - http://groups.drupal.org/interaction-designers-network is one area and even more http://groups.drupal.org/usability Best regards, Greg -- Greg Knaddison | 303-800-5623 | http://growingventuresolutions.com Mastering Drupal - http://www.masteringdrupal.com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
