I’ve been part of the open source ownCloud project as designer since the first 5-people-meeting at the beginning of 2011. That’s more than 5 years now, and it has been an incredible time with many cool people. Since late 2012 I was also working on it full-time as employee of ownCloud Inc.
When Frank first talked to me about the idea of forming a company around ownCloud, I was both skeptical and excited. Definitely more skeptical though, as it’s difficult to balance an open source project and company. Seeing the success and widespread attention then warmed me up more and more to the company until I eventually joined full-time.
Through these years I always made sure that we are a welcoming community, especially also for designers. We use the »Design« issue tag to heighten the profile of design in the project, formed a design team, share knowledge with non-design contributors to lower the dev-design divide and do all our design planning on the public issue tracker.
I handed in my resignation last month and today (31 May 2016, although vacation) is my last day at the company. That doesn’t mean I’ll be leaving the ownCloud community as a designer though. There are some really cool people in the community I wouldn’t just leave. And I strongly believe in an open source design process of explanation and documentation.
You can check out what I’m up to next on my website, Github or follow me @jancborchardt.