User registeration is currently being handled by a third-party identity and access management provider called AuthMachine. Users can register for OU by going to this link. During the registeration, the email of the users is verified and they are asked to set their username and password. Currently there's no restriction such as minimum lenght is introduced for the username.

Once users complete registeration, they will be going through the onboarding steps where they are asked to provide some inforamtion to complete the creation of their profiles. Currently the onboarding is divided into two steps: Providing basic profile details: First Name (required) Last Name (required) Profile Picture (option) Bio (optional) Providing Skills & Expertise Selecting a set of skills (optional) Selecting a set of expertise based on each selected skills (optional)  

User profile is one of the core functionality of OpenUnited. It's where the personal details and contribution of the users are showcased. Many OpenUnited users are contributing to products to build up their portoflio which is represented in their profile. Profile as a more powerful version of LinkedIn + GitHub/Dribbble: Users can use the profiles to showcase their skills to the outside world. For instance, an OpenUnited user can include their OU profile in their CV or send directly to the companies that they are applying for jobs. It's a more powerful version of LinkedIn + GitHub where all the contributions as well as descriptions of each tasks are accesssible through the profile, therefore, it's easier for companies to assess the skill of the candidate. In many cases, it can replace the existing case studies where developers or designers should spent countless hours of their time for free while applying for jobs. User's profile include two main sections: Uesr's personal details: information about the user and their skills User's contribution: chronological list of all users contribution

Future vision: OpenUnited users should be able to create and manage products. Creating public products should be free for everyone and creating private product might require subscription (this logic is not implemented yet).  Users can also request for adding their public products to the OpenUnited marketplace which gives them a chance of getting exposed to all contributors on OpenUnited. Submitting a request for getting featured on OU marketplace can be done by clicking on "Add Product" in the navbar of OU and filling in the form. OpenUnited team will review all submissions and approve and reject products for getting featured on OU marketplace. Current state: There's no ability for OU users to create products via UI. They need to use the "Add Product" button in the navbar and once filling in the form, OU will receive the submission and create the product manually for the users.

Contributors who are coming to OpenUnited should have an easy way to find work and contribute. Some background around the need: Finding suitable work to contribute for contributors of all kinds is one of the main issues within the open source ecosystem. For instance, it's not easy for a designer, a product manager or a UX researcher to find an open source project to contribute given that most open source projects are designed for developers and live in a very developer-oriented ecosystem and tooling. For developers, it's also not easy to find such projects given GitHub is an occean of millions of projects with no specific category which requires hours of digging to find something suitable for their needs. Product discovery in OpenUnited: We want to put product and task discoveries at the heart of what we do given that's the start of contributors journey. This is the reason that we designed our home page to be a place for discovering tasks and products. Current state: Both registered and non-registered users can explore tasks and products We believe in a bottom-up discovery, first discoverying a suitable task and from there finding a suitable product, hence we decided to make the task discovery as a default tab on the home page. We're going to experiment with both though and the strategy might change in the future. Given the number of available tasks are going to be high, we implemented some filtering which enable developers to filter the task based on one of the following criterias Filtering based on Priority, Status, Task Category and Expertise Sorting based on Priority or Status (as a drop-down) We haven't implemented any filtering for the discover product page yet given the number of products are low We haven't implemented any categories for the discover product page yet given the number of products are low

Product Tree is one of the most important artifact of any products on OpenUntied. This comes from a product management framework which we recnetly introduced called FreshLatte. What is a product tree? Product tree is a visualization of all the capabilities of the product. Each product has a set of high-level capabilities and each of those capabilities have nested capabilities that might have further nested capabilities and so forth. What's the purpose of product tree? Better and faster onboarding into the product —> In all product teams, it's important to understand the functionalities of the product quickly. This is even more important when the onboarding to the product takes place async. A potential contributor of a product needs to be able to quickly skim through capabilties and zoom in the ares that they are interested in. Easier context gathering for a contribution —> In order to have an effective contribution to the product, it's often required to get more context on the area of a product that a task relates to. Within OpenUnited, most tasks are mapped to specific capabilitiies of the product tree and this helps contributors to get more context about hte relevant part of the product. More effective product management —> In companies, it's often unclear what complex product does and there's no single source of truth that represents the product capabilties. Product tree helps product leaders to visualize their products and map out context and insight to the relevant part of the tree. Often times new insights are uncovered during product discoveries and user research and mapping those to the right part of the tree would enable product leaders to access them at the right time whenever needed. Here is an example of a product tree on OpenUnited:

Task model, scenarios and statuses

Setting allows core teams to set the preferences for the product.

Any registered or not registered users can visit public products and explore their capabilities, initiatives and tasks. However, people that are part of a product can have one of these roles: 1. Product Admin (defined on the Product level) = user who created this product on OU 2. Product Manager = a user that has the manager role on a product 3. Contributor (defined on the product level) = user who claimed at least one task

All the registered users on OpenUnited can submit bugs and ideas for products. The core team has to approve the submitted bug or idea and once it's approved it will be shown on the Bugs & Ideas section of the product. Users can upvote the approved bugs and ideas and this will help the core team to identify the most relevant bugs and ideas in order to prioritize for product development.