Jan-Christoph Borchardt (born 3 May 1989 in

Minden Minden () is a middle-sized town in the very north-east of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, the largest town in population between Bielefeld and Hanover. It is the capital of the district () of Minden-Lübbecke, situated in the cultural region ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

) is a German

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

interaction design Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." While interaction design has an interest in form (similar to other design fields), its main area of foc ...

er. He is primarily known for his work on Open Source Design,

Terms of Service; Didn't Read Terms of Service; Didn't Read (ToS;DR) is a community project that aims to analyze and grade the terms of service (TOS) and privacy policies of major Internet sites and services. Each aspect of a TOS or privacy policy is assessed as positive, nega ...

ownCloud ownCloud is a Free Software Foundation, free and open-source software project for content collaboration, File sharing, file-sharing, and file-syncing. It's usable in distributed and Federation (information technology), federated enterprise scena ...

, and now

Nextcloud Nextcloud is a suite of Client–server model, client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. It can integrate with the Collabora Online and OnlyOffice office suites. It can be hosted in the Cloud computing, cloud or On-pre ...

Open Source Design

In his bachelor thesis "Usability in Free Software" he argues that "For a software to truly be free, people need to be able to easily use it without help". His thesis has the subtitle "Freedom 4: The freedom to use the program effectively, efficiently and satisfactorily", a reference to the four freedoms of free software. He is a cofounder of Open Source Design, "a community of designers and developers pushing more open design processes and improving the user experience and interface design of open source software". To that effect he has been responsible for the introduction of the “Open Source Design room” in 2015 at

FOSDEM Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is an annual software engineering conference. It is non-commercial and volunteer-organized with a focus on free and open-source software. Initiated in 2000, it is usually held d ...

as well as FOSSASIA in 2016. In 2013 he was a lecturer for Design in Open Source Software at the nationally recognised University of Design, Art and Media "Merz Akademie" in

Stuttgart Stuttgart (; ; Swabian German, Swabian: ; Alemannic German, Alemannic: ; Italian language, Italian: ; ) is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Baden-Württemberg by population, largest city of the States of Germany, German state of ...

Free software

Borchardt contributes to several open-source projects and communities. This includes

Shotwell (software) Shotwell is an image organizer designed to provide personal photo management for the GNOME desktop environment. In 2010, it replaced F-Spot as the standard image tool for several GNOME-based Linux distributions, including Fedora in version 13 and ...

Diaspora (social network) Diaspora (stylized as diaspora*) is a nonprofit, user-owned, distributed social network. It consists of a group of independently owned nodes (called ''pods'') which interoperate to form the network. The social network is not owned by any one pe ...

elementary OS Elementary OS (stylized as elementary OS) is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu LTS. It promotes itself as a "thoughtful, capable, and ethical" replacement to macOS and Microsoft Windows, Windows and has a pay what you want, pay-what-you-wan ...

as well as the

and

projects. In 2012 he co-founded

, a community project aiming to analyze and grade the terms of service and privacy policies of major internet sites and services. He is co-chair of the W3C Unhosted Web Community Group. Based on his belief that contributing to open-source is already difficult enough he is also a cofounder of the Stuttgart JS and Tel Aviv JS meetups. As well as several other community events such as AfricaHackTrip.

ownCloud and Nextcloud

Since early 2011 he has been the lead designer of

. As of 2016 after the fork of ownCloud into

he is employed by Nextcloud as design lead.

References

External links

Homepage of Jan-Christoph Borchardt
{{DEFAULTSORT:Borchardt, Jan-Christoph Free software programmers Interface designers 1989 births Living people Nextcloud German computer programmers