CivicTheme establishes a formal steering committee to guide its rapid growth

We’re very excited to announce that we’ve organised the official CivicTheme Steering Committee (aka Steerco) to help shape the future of the CivicTheme open-source project. In this article, we provide an overview of the steering committee and its objectives, as well as how you can get involved with the CivicTheme project.

Our seed committee

We have been planning the committee's formation for some time and have now created the inaugural “seed committee” to get things focused and back on track. While Salsa Digital(Opens in a new tab/window), as the project initiator and maintainer, currently fills most of the seats, we are thrilled to have member representation from the GovCMS(Opens in a new tab/window) program leadership team join us, who have a wealth of experience building large-scale technical and community-based programs. In the coming months, we’ll be recruiting additional members and advisors, so stay tuned!

Core committee members

Chair: Kristen Pol(Opens in a new tab/window), Salsa Digital, Open Source Contribution Lead

Secretary: Con Fountas(Opens in a new tab/window), Salsa Digital, Strategic Account Manager

Founder: Alfred Deeb(Opens in a new tab/window), Salsa Digital, Founding Director

Members: GovCMS(Opens in a new tab/window), The Department of Finance(Opens in a new tab/window)

Product team and advisors

Design & UX: Alan Rako(Opens in a new tab/window), Salsa Digital, CivicTheme Design Lead

Technical Lead: Alex Skrypnyk(Opens in a new tab/window), Salsa Digital, CivicTheme Technical Lead

Accessibility: John Cloys(Opens in a new tab/window), Salsa Digital, CivicTheme Accessibility Lead

User Research: Tom Peterson(Opens in a new tab/window), Salsa Digital, CivicTheme User Research SME

Product Management: Fiona Morrison(Opens in a new tab/window), Salsa Digital, CivicTheme Product Manager

How open source projects can be governed

A complex illustration depicting various aspects of open source project governance, featuring interconnected icons such as gears, documents, and user avatars, symbolising the diverse components and workflows involved in managing an open source project.

There are many different ways to govern an open-source project. Smaller projects may simply be managed by the core maintainer or a core project team and may or may not have formal guidelines for contribution, code of conduct or other governance processes. Medium-sized projects may have more formal processes that include governing committees or boards. Larger open-source projects would have additional formal governance frameworks and very rigorous structures, such as non-profit organisations.

Some of the potential formal governing bodies for open-source projects include community councils, governance boards, project management committees, steering committees, technical steering committees and open-source foundations. The charters of these governing bodies can vary, but their ultimate goal is to ensure the success and sustainability of their open-source project. These groups focus on many aspects of the project, including governance, management, policies, legal and financial requirements, technical direction, strategic planning, contribution and community outreach.

Benefits of a steering committee

For open source projects, a steering committee can provide many benefits to the project, including better community engagement, clear strategic planning, efficient use of funding, creation of important policies and processes, and ensuring the community has a voice in the project’s direction. Committee members are committed to the project’s mission and values and bring their own strengths and insights to benefit the project as a whole.

A steering committee brings a group of people together to collaborate on guiding and directing an open-source project. The committee is responsible for setting strategic goals and priorities, providing direction, maintaining a code of conduct, resolving community conflicts and managing any funding. Along with internal meetings, the steering committee communicates with the wider community, end users and other open-source projects to foster contribution and adoption.

Compared with a more formal board, a steering committee is often more flexible and adaptable and has fewer bureaucratic and legal requirements. As such, it can typically incorporate feedback from a larger audience faster and be more responsive to the community. These benefits help ensure the project's sustainability and foster a healthy and inclusive community of contributors.

For the CivicTheme project, the steering committee will help with key objectives, including:

Define project goals, objectives and policies
Direct project roadmap
Formalisation and project legitimacy
Promote and market the project
Help increase adoption
Build and support community
Recruit new members
Foster existing and new implementations
Form strategic and symbiotic partnerships and alliances

The governance structure

The governance model includes the core steering committee, an advisory panel and strategic working groups. This is a common pattern reflected in larger open-source projects. As noted above, the steering committee will provide more flexibility over a more formal board arrangement.

While the Salsa CivicTheme product team currently serves as the project’s implementation team, the goal is to shift their responsibilities to a technical working group as the project matures and there is more community involvement. If you’re interested in helping with design or implementation, check out the contribution section below.

A diagram illustrating the governance structure of a project featuring a steering committee, advisory panel, and product team at the top level and multiple working groups below, all connected by lines to show the flow of input and governance across the groups

Steering (core) committee

The steering ‘core committee’ is responsible for providing direction and oversight for the project to ensure its health and viability. Individual roles have their own focus areas and responsibilities, but it’s expected that the members work collaboratively to support each other and the project. Responsibilities of the committee members include:

Strategic planning: Members will collaboratively determine the project's overall direction and strategy, including vision, goals and priorities.
Governance: Members will collaboratively support the creation and maintenance of the project’s policies and procedures, such as contribution guidelines and licensing agreements.
Decision-making: Members will collaboratively participate in key decision-making regarding the project’s management, development and operations.
Operations management: Members will collaboratively support the management of finances, fundraising and other operations necessary for the success of the project.
Representation: Members will represent the committee, its stakeholders and the community when attending events or communicating on behalf of the committee.
Community engagement: Members will collaboratively help foster community engagement and a healthy environment for contribution.

Steerco advisory panel

While the steering (core) committee will focus on overall direction, governance, and sustainability, it will also consult with specialist advisors on the advisory panel as needed to make informed decisions. The goal is to include advisors from different organisations, industries and backgrounds to ensure CivicTheme is representing and serving the needs of all end users. Some focus areas include:

Product focus: Advisors who focus on the design system itself to help with maintaining and evolving the product.
User focus: Advisors who represent specific user groups such as a website builder or government agency end user who uses the product.
Specialty focus: Advisors who are experts in their specialisation, such as design systems, accessibility and user research.
Operations focus: Advisors who are professionals in running an organisation or large open source project such as fundraising or marketing.

Working groups

Working groups are organised around key areas such as product focuses, implementations and industries. While these groups will meet independently, they report to the steering committee, which must approve key actions and decisions to ensure alignment.

Below are some potential working groups, with the teal ones being some of the first likely candidates. Given the pressing need, we’ve already started organising a marketing working group highlighted in orange.

CivicTheme’s guiding star

An illustration of a guiding star in a vibrant cosmic scene featuring a prominent, bright blue starburst at the centre with rays extending outwards. The background is a dark blue sky dotted with smaller stars and occasional meteor trails, creating a dynamic and inspiring celestial scene

For any project, it’s important to know where it’s heading and to have a ‘guiding star’ to ensure that if it deviates, it can re-centre. The steering committee is responsible for creating the CivicTheme project’s vision, mission and high-level strategic roadmap to reflect our aspirational goals.

Project vision and mission

The project’s vision:

“The CivicTheme project aspires to be a leading open-source design system.”

The project’s mission:

“The CivicTheme project’s mission is to define, develop, evolve and promote an engaging and accessible modern open source design system with implementations in key open source technologies.”

The project’s roadmap

CivicTheme currently focuses on informational system patterns that are ideal for flexible, component-based landing pages. We’re also working on some common intranet site patterns based on real-world client needs. In the future, we will explore expanding CivicTheme to include transactional system and data visualisation patterns to serve even more use cases.

As for implementations, our Drupal theme(Opens in a new tab/window) is full-featured and used by high-profile organisations such as key Australian and New Zealand government agencies. Australia’s GovCMS(Opens in a new tab/window) hosting provider will also be incorporating CivicTheme(Opens in a new tab/window) into their platform. Future implementations will likely be added for popular frontend frameworks such as React(Opens in a new tab/window) and Vue(Opens in a new tab/window) and other popular content management systems like WordPress(Opens in a new tab/window).

CivicTheme already has solid accessibility(Opens in a new tab/window) built into the software, and we are currently working on two key initiatives around user research(Opens in a new tab/window) and security(Opens in a new tab/window). Other areas we intend to focus on are basic search engine optimisation(Opens in a new tab/window) and supporting internationalisation and potential localisation(Opens in a new tab/window). And, we are also exploring ways to integrate with standard content schemas to help content editors even more.

Learn more about CivicTheme

What is CivicTheme?

CivicTheme is an open-source, inclusive and component-based true design system. It was created so organisations and government agencies can rapidly assemble modern, consistent and compliant digital experiences. Some CivicTheme benefits include:

Based on atomic design principles
Component library connecting code and design
User-centred and accessible design
Technology agnostic
Open source and based on open standards

Why was CivicTheme created?

When developing government websites, Salsa noticed a recurrence of common patterns in development projects, with their teams having to implement similar solutions repeatedly. CivicTheme was developed to standardise this work so it could be leveraged across projects. CivicTheme helps projects get implemented faster and with a higher level of quality and consistency.

How was CivicTheme created?

CivicTheme was developed following a general approach:

Identifying clear and common patterns for delivering successful websites
UX audit and customer research of GovCMS project websites
Review and leverage thinking from the former Australian Government Design System(Opens in a new tab/window)
Review of GovCMS (Gen 1) UI Kit 1.0(Opens in a new tab/window)
UX expertise in modern design patterns(Opens in a new tab/window)

Our customer research included talking to clients and reviewing existing GovCMS websites with modern interfaces. We also looked at common design patterns and frequently used components in past projects delivered over the years.

The former Australian Design System, although out of date in its implementation and technology, provided a foundational base that was tried and tested, providing a baseline set of common features and requirements; this included key features such as:

Use of an accessible colour system (dark and light themes) and font guidelines
Commonly used components including form styles, buttons, headers, cards and breadcrumbs

Our solution architect and UX designers reviewed all of these inputs to develop an initial design system framework with well-considered key and commonly used components. Additionally, key areas for CivicTheme development included:

Lessons learned from past user testing and customer feedback
A focus on AA/AAA accessibility, leveraging Nielsen Norman Group(Opens in a new tab/window) research and Vision Australia(Opens in a new tab/window) validation
Less focus on unused and/or unnecessary features, such as hero carousels and full-screen body copy
A greater focus on mobile behaviour, including swiping, gestures and screen reachability

Read the full case study(Opens in a new tab/window) for more information.

Who created CivicTheme?

CivicTheme has been developed and is currently maintained by Salsa Digital(Opens in a new tab/window) since February 2021. Salsa has invested more than 8,000 hours into the CivicTheme technical project and ecosystem and continues to spearhead its development. Nearly 30 people across Salsa have contributed to CivicTheme, including UI/UX designers, frontend and backend developers, accessibility experts, project managers, open source community experts, quality assurance testers and more.

Salsa has open-sourced this technology in order to increase CivicTheme’s adoption across government and the private sector. The hope is that CivicTheme will allow websites to be built faster and provide a better user experience for end users. Salsa is committed to helping continue to govern the CivicTheme project and welcomes additional government, industry, client and development partners to join us on this journey.

Getting involved with CivicTheme

The CivicTheme team is committed to creating an exceptional open-source product. While Salsa initially developed the software, we want to foster a community contribution model where anyone can help out, whether with design, development, testing or other areas.

We welcome your contribution!

Here are some places to get started:

Resources

Here are some resources that you might find useful to learn more about CivicTheme, open-source governance, and steering committees:

CivicTheme resources

CivicTheme articles

CivicTheme case studies

CivicTheme videos

Adopting an open source design system for GovCMS(Opens in a new tab/window) - Sharyn Clarkson (Sep 2023)
Design in Figma, launch on Drupal in days, not weeks(Opens in a new tab/window) - Akhil Bhandari (May 2023)
GovCMS Deep Dive into content sharing at scale / User Experience & Content(Opens in a new tab/window) - Sharyn Clarkson (May 2023)
Drupal Melbourne Meetup - Dec 2022 - Drupal 10 Launch(Opens in a new tab/window) (Feb 2023)
Building a secure, authenticated federal agency Drupal platform(Opens in a new tab/window) - Juliane Erben & Alex Skrypnyk (Nov 2022)
Wriggling out from the weight of Covid to take GovCMS on its next adventure(Opens in a new tab/window) - Sharyn Clarkson (Oct 2022)
The challenges of designing a HCD component-based(Opens in a new tab/window) - Akhil Bhandari (Oct 2022)
The challenges of designing a HCD component-based design system and Drupal 9 theme - Melbourne Meetup(Opens in a new tab/window) - Akhil Bhandari (Sep 2022)
CivicTheme Demo(Opens in a new tab/window) - Danielle Sheffler (Apr 2022)

CivicTheme establishes a formal steering committee to guide its rapid growth