Participation Guidelines

The Open-Design project is designed to be a community participation project. In the course of a specific voting period, the community will have an opportunity to suggest and vote for deserving open-source and non-profit projects for the Open-Design team to work on. At the end of the voting period, the Open-Design team will work on the project with the highest number of votes provided the organization or the open-source project approves.

After a project is selected, a project team will be assembled from willing participants and volunteers. There will be a new team selected for each project cycle. Our goal is to develop no more than three projects a year depending on participation. Over the course of the project, the team will work together as a professional design team with cooperation from the clients to develop a new design for the chosen project. The process will mimic real world development as much as possible with deadlines and milestones so that the participants can get the full experience.

The teams' work will be supervised by a select team of industry experts who collaborate with the team for a few minutes each week to discuss progress and address and difficulties team members may have. Therefore, to participate and be selected for the team, you should meet the following requirements.

Requirements for Participation

• Each participant must have some kind of portfolio. A commercial portfolio/experience is not necessary. As long as there is some evidence of previous work.
• The projects are expected to take anywhere from six weeks to three months to complete and so will require some level of dedication by the chosen project members. The project team will be reasonably sized to reduce the workload on all team members, but the projects will still require several hours a week. Please, do not submit a portfolio if you are not willing to sacrifice the time.
• Willingness to learn.

Please note that while we will try to get sponsors to support the project and provide incentives for particpation, the open-source and non-profit organizations will not be charged for the development work on their websites, therefore, participants will not be paid for their participation.

also...

At the end of the project development cycle, all participants that successfully finish their assigned tasks and provided full participation will have a project to add to their portfolio with references provided by The Open Design Project as well as by one or more industry experts who worked with them during the development cycle.

The progress of the entire project can be followed on the development blog. This will provide an opportunity for the project team to express their feelings about the difficulties and challenges of working on the project as well as what they are learning so that others can benefit from them.