• http://codename-prometheus.eu

    We are designing a new kind of organisation…
    …to make products that seamlessly combine hardware, software, and services…
    …to create beautiful new experiences…
    …that happen to be open.

    http://aralbalkan.com/notes/codename-prometheus

    Do you want a great user experience or an open source platform? How about a great user experience or privacy? And why should you have to choose one or the other? Are these things destined to be mutually exclusive? (No, they aren’t.) And why does it matter if they are? (It matters, because, in an increasingly technological world, the very character of our future lives, our civil liberties, and our privacy depends on having a widely‐adopted open ecosystem.)

    To put it bluntly, the current crop of features‐led open source products are stuck in the Age of Features and cannot compete successfully in the consumer space with the products of a design‐led, experience‐driven company like Apple. And yet, competing in the consumer space on user experience is exactly what open source needs to do if we are to have open alternatives to the closed silos of Google, Apple, and Facebook; closed silos that increasingly shape, regulate, and filter our experience of the world.

    Open source today is the domain of über geeks. Open source development centers around democratic decision making and ‘choice’ and ‘customisability’ are seen as admirable end goals instead of failures of design. Don’t get me wrong, this culture has given us many wonderful things, including the software that powers most of the Internet. I have the utmost respect for anyone who shares their time, knowledge, and effort on open source projects.

    #open_source #numérique #UX #plate-forme #design