Jan-Christoph Borchardt

Jan-Christoph Borchardt (born 3 May 1989 in Minden, Germany) is a German open source interaction designer. He is primarily known for his work on Open Source Design, Terms of Service; Didn't Read, ownCloud, and now Nextcloud.^[1][2]

Jan-Christoph Borchardt
Jan-Christoph Borchardt at GUADEC 2015
Born	(1989-05-03) 3 May 1989 (age 36) Minden, Germany
Nationality	German
Occupation	open source designer
Known for	ownCloud, Nextcloud, Terms of Service; Didn't Read
Website	jancborchardt.net

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.^[3][4]

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".^[5][6] To that effect he has been responsible for the introduction of the “Open Source Design room” in 2015 at FOSDEM as well as FOSSASIA in 2016.^[7]

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, Germany.^[8]

Free software

Borchardt contributes to several open-source projects and communities. This includes Shotwell (software),^[9] Diaspora (social network),^[10] elementary OS^[11] as well as the Nextcloud and ownCloud projects.^[1]

In 2012 he co-founded Terms of Service; Didn't Read,^[12] a community project aiming to analyze and grade the terms of service and privacy policies of major internet sites and services.^[13] He is co-chair of the W3C Unhosted Web Community Group.^[14]

Based on his belief that contributing to open-source is already difficult enough^[15] he is also a cofounder of the Stuttgart JS and Tel Aviv JS meetups. As well as several other community events such as AfricaHackTrip.^[6]

ownCloud and Nextcloud

Since early 2011 he has been the lead designer of ownCloud.^[16][17] As of 2016 after the fork of ownCloud into Nextcloud he is employed by Nextcloud as design lead.^[18]