Fluid Community Studios

Fluid Studios

Fluid Studios is a space to incubate new ideas, projects, and collaborations dedicated to improving the usability and accessibility of the open web. The Studios provide an opportunity for new contributions that extend beyond our core production tools like Infusion, fostering informal experimentation and innovation in the field of inclusive design with students, designers, developers, and users from around the world.

The Fluid Community

As a community, Fluid is dedicated to helping improve the usability, accessibility, and inclusiveness of the open web. We're constantly experimenting with new ways to design software more openly and collaboratively. We promote new forms of meritocracy in open source, recognizing the diversity of contributions that go into successful software and inviting users to participate in the process. Fluid creates software that empowers users to control their experience of the web and personalize it to meet their own needs and preferences. Recognizing that one size never fits all, our notion of design includes the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age, and other forms of human difference.

What are the Studios?

Fluid Studios consists of a website for showcasing projects, and a mailing list for collaborating with the community. Eventually, we will also provide infrastructure for building and hosting projects. Experiments, crazy ideas, novel designs, student projects, and nascent open source projects are all welcome.

The heart of the Studios is the website (studios.fluidproject.org), which serves as an open gallery for contributors to work collaboratively, document their progress, and showcase their projects.

For communication, we use the fluid-talk mailing list as a forum for brainstorming, discussion, and collaboration amongst members of the Fluid community, without all the extra noise of Fluid's chatty Infusion release process discussions. Studio contributors are actively welcomed in our fluid-work IRC channel, and further topic-specific channels can be created as needed.

Who can participate?

Anyone who has an idea or wants to help improve the usability, accessibility, and inclusiveness of the open web. Fluid Studios participants will:

  • Contribute to the goals and growth of the Fluid community
  • Work openly within the spirit and techniques of open source culture
  • Share their designs, code, and work freely under an open license

Lifecycle of a Studio Project

Fluid Studios is designed as a place to experiment, brainstorm, and fail. Some projects may grow and be incubated into officially supported Fluid tools, while others may be time-limited projects or collaborations amongst students or developers. Here's a rough outline a Studio project's lifecycle:

  • Individuals or groups express an interest in working on a Studio project
  • Get set up with an account and space within the Studio infrastructure
  • Projects grow and evolve:
    • Are incubated into a new existing production-level Fluid project (such as Infusion)
    • Remain informal but active in the Studios for an extended period of time
    • Evolve into a formal stand-alone project or supported by other communities (e.g. contributions to jQuery UI or Mozilla)
    • Active for a fixed period of time, and then are archived

Studios Website

The Studios website is built on top of a plain WordPress installation. This site, like all the work we do in the Fluid community, is being developed in the open and we are always happy to have contributions. If you interested in getting involved here are some starting points: