learning

They have an idea. They have programming skills. And now they have 182 days to create a prototype. This is the Prototype Fund, a German government program to support open-source projects. Superbloom has been providing support for the teams on “everything but code” since 2018 – from UX design to fundraising and everything in between. This blog post is for Prototype Fund teams, and really, it’s for anyone hoping to do a lot on a development project in a short time. Here’s how you make the most of 182 days!

In 2024 we returned to COSCUP to hold another workshop focussed on designers making a contribution to an OSS project: “Designers in Tech-Open Source Design Workshop”.

A Tech Policy Design Playbook was developed and published as the culmination of our work with the World Wide Web Foundation and 3x3 on Deceptive Design, and includes guidance on how to run community co-design engagements around tech policy design. Superbloom, in partnership with Dr Carolina Are, facilitated three community sessions around the risks to “high risk” content creators and being de-platformed from essential social and content platforms.

In December 2022, Superbloom partnered with Internews and Okthanks to create resources that help open source software (OSS) teams better understand how design processes and user-centered activities improve usability, and therefore the security of open source tools. After publishing these resources and speaking about them to the wider OSS community, we found that designers and developers working in privacy and security OSS tool teams wanted to explore specific challenges through conversations with us. This led to the final component of the Adoptable project in the form of coaching.