New Penpot Community, a chat with the team

“You may have received emails from Carol at Penpot… ¡She’s that Carol!” Pablo, from the Community team, introduced all the speakers to our new live stream with a new format. For the first time, we had 4 voices on stage: Carol and Pablo, from the Penpot Community, Andy, designer at Penpot, and Eva, developer at Penpot (who recently starred in a live stream on coding).

Carol went over the structure of this new space created to welcome everyone willing to participate and contribute to Penpot: “We want the community to be part of the team and the team part of the community, bringing meaningful conversations all in one place”. How? Through a community space built on the open source platform Discourse designed in a simple way for users to find what they are looking for.

I’ll give you a few examples. Let’s take contributions, for instance, that’s where you should go to chat about templates, libraries, translations and, generally speaking, anything the community is sharing to be reused by all. Of course, there’s also a category to ask questions, another one devoted to non-English speakers and the “must-have” troubleshooting area. We even have a specific place for people to upload memes made by Penpot, don’t underestimate Penpot’s potential for superfun use cases!

As a designer, Andy noted that the real virtue of the platform is to “bring more designers to participate in open source”. According to him, the Penpot Community lowers the barrier that some profiles, like designers or other stakeholders, find when trying to contribute in overly technical environments.

Eva helped us understand the way they manage contributions. She explained how we prioritize the backlog and voiced how great it is to have bugs reported “because sometimes they are too hard to find”. She also recognized the great job the community does when they ask for features that the team would have never considered and she had a special recognition for contributions: “Sharing templates or helping with translations not only help the team but provide the community with more resources to work with Penpot”.

There’s no doubt the community needs the team, but the team really needs the community to build Penpot. To showcase this co-creation, Eva brought the conversation Thoughts on Penpot’s User Interface, an article written by Juan that explains how important it is to collect feedback from the community. In that occasion, to enable users to keep the focus on the essential feature by simplifying the interface.

As if it was part of the script, the live stream ended with a question by attendee Victor Crespo:

  • “How about creating and resizing shapes from their center? Is it already possible?”
  • “If it doesn’t work… You might have found a bug! ; )”
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I loved being “on stage” with such great team members, @carolina.portugal @Eva_Marco and @myfunnyandy and I loved the questions from the audience. I particularly enjoyed the question that linked SCM (like git) with Penpot’s SVG approach because it’s something I’m particularly excited about so it’s cool to see how great minds think alike :laughing:

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It was a great and fun conversation indeed.

For everyone’s peace of mind, the bug is being taken care of :sweat_smile:

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