ODK, an 18-year-old open source platform used in 190 countries, forced designer Tara to confront a hard truth: publishing work online is not the same as designing in the open. The distinction matters. ODK's tools powered WHO's polio vaccination of 17 million children in the DRC and biodiversity monitoring across 27 EU member states. Its Android app was among the first ever built for the platform. Designing at that scale, across 60-plus languages, offline environments, and unpredictable use cases including one user who built a Salesforce-style farm management system inside ODK, demands radical transparency at every stage of the process.
The team built two core design principles: transparency and trust. Both required structural commitments, not just values statements. They published a public roadmap in Notion using a now, next, and later format. No timelines, which frustrated some users, but the tradeoff was accountability and zero information gatekeeping. They also ran monthly community calls where contributors co-designed features in real time. This did not replace traditional user research. It added a channel that corporate product teams rarely bother to build.
The full article details how the team moved from feature shipping to what the author calls product stewardship, a shift in mindset that reshaped how decisions were documented, communicated, and defended. The argument buried in the third section, about the un/learning loop and what open source forces you to unlearn from private-sector habits, is where the piece earns its keep. Worth reading if you design systems that outlive your involvement in them.
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