Define a base for decisions

Define an overall goal to have an answer for questions you do not know yet.

Goal

Establish trust

Truly respect and invite the users to collaborate.

Collaboration

Be transparent and write everything (!) down.

Document everything

Be inviting and combine your centralized team with a federated approach.

Team setup

Use your design system as a bootcamp for new colleagues.

Onboarding

Clearly communicate the states of your components and also provide beta states to let your community experiment.

(Beta) states

Make decisions comprehensible and document the reason for every version.

Versioning

Create a decision tree to let the users know how they can contribute.

Existence criteria

Celebrate contributions.

Contribution

Naming is hard, do it collaboratively.

Taxonomy

Enable creativity

Enable flexibility by offering a mix of fixed and loose rules.

Principles

Don’t forget your designers and define areas for creativity.

Consistency vs. creativity

Use accessibility as an opportunity

Everyone benefits if products are easier to use.

Accessibility

Be ready for the future

Define your principles in ranges so that future components can also be classified.

Principles

Define rough patterns to have an environment for the components.

Patterns