Free Software for Well-Being

Group mission: To create libre/free (as in freedom) applications for people to increase the well-being in themselves and others.

Group vision: A suite of software applications - covering all aspects of daily life - helping people reach, improve and maintain well-being in their daily life.

Group values: Contributing to the commons, sharing our creations with others and each other. Expressing care through our work.

Important inspirations:

• Buddhism (mindfulness, loving kindness)
• Nonviolent Communication ("NVC") (feelings, needs)
• Self-compassion

People part of this group:

• Programmers
• UX Designers
• People knowledgeble about mental health and well-being
• Users of software for well-being interested in helping by providing feedback
• People who have ideas for applications

Social goals of the group:

• To encourage and inspire each other
• Discussing and sharing ideas for applications
• Helping people find other designers/programmers for their free software project
• Working with joy and playfulness --- Please contribute with the energy "of a small child feeding a hungry duck" (Marshall Rosenberg)

Other goals of the project:

• Maintaining a list of free software for well-being
• Encouraging the use of free software tools when working to create free software
  • Examples of software development tools: Penpot (for design), Codeberg (for Git hosting and project hosting)

This repo

• gives an overview of the group
• contains documents supporting the design and development of free software applications for well-being
  • most importantly the dev-process.md

Contributing

Chat on Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#fswb-general:fairydust.space

Information shared on wiki

Publicly available info may be entered by anyone and stored in the table on this wiki page

User can optionally write something about themselves below the table. For this they need a codeberg login. This may contain more sensitive information and is up to the user to share

Please note that the wiki page is publicly available and anyone can read it's contents

Open conversation policy

Unless conversations are clearly of a private nature, we can choose to share them with other team members. The reasons for this policy is so that it does not take too long to relay information to others, and also it may be that other people have valuable ideas or input in the conversation.

Licenses

Recommended licenses:

• For software applications: GPLv3 or AGPLv3
• For websites: CC BY-SA 4.0

These licenses are copyleft licenses, which means that derivative works are required to also be in the commons

UX design guidelines and inspirations

• Putting care first - designing for humans, rather than for profit (ref: User-centered design), and for many people rather than for a single user (the latter might mean that we want the onboarding to be simple). This means that applications are licensed under a free software license, (and preferrably a copy-left license)
• Remembering to be inclusive of the great many people in this world who are suffering from mental health issues (anxiety, depression, etc)
• The design - and application development in general - is well-documented and easy to build upon for other people who want to play with the design and might want to contribute or create their own version
• Getting early design feedback from the people who are going to use the application (ref: User-centered design, and "careable")
• The user can share her experience to meet the need for belonging (ex: In well-being-diary entries can be shared with people)
• Minimalism, so that the user is not overwhelmed or distracted by the application (ex: mindfulness-at-the-computer). This is especially important when it comes to notifications
• Remembering that there is a life outside of the users' electronic devices, with people and nature. We may want to remind the user about this, or help them get connect with people IRL or nature
• We may want to design for gratitude, meaning, self-understanding, compassion and meaningful relationships

Reference: https://www.humanetech.com/designguide

Contact

Chat on Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#fswb-general:fairydust.space