1. We believe that better services can and should be designed.
2. We are an open source, not for profit organisation, that exists to share knowledge and ideas between the people designing services to help make those services better, sooner, for the benefit of all.
3. We are run by service designers, for service designers. Membership and participation is open to all individuals practicing service design around the world that want to share their ideas about the practice with other practitioners.
4. Basically it's all about talking about the 'doing it' part of service design with other people that are too. And its a two way thing. Give to get. Don't be all take-y.
5. Servicedesigning.org is organised into city based chapters. Each chapter is encouraged to develop the service design community within their city by organising conversations, discussions and all types of events, off and online to help build a better informed community of practice that can design better services.
6. Any events organised under the servicedesigning.org name, or any associated names, must be not for profit, and ideally open to all. In addition, as much as possible should be documented online, for free, using the many freely available web publishing services.
7. If you want to run a service design event in a city that already has a chapter, start by getting in touch with that chapter's coordinators directly. If there's not a chapter in your city and you want to run a service design event under the servicedesigning.org name or any associated names, get in touch with us when you're ready to set up your first event and we can give you advice and resources.
8. Servicedesigning.org does not directly promote any specific design or service organisations. Sponsorship of events and so on is fine as long as its clearly labelled as such. Talking about your company's practice is fine, as long as you're sharing knowledge. Banging on relentlessly about any particular company or group is not, especially if you're just doing it to get clients or whatever. Everyone knows what this means, so don't ruin it.
9. Servicedesigning does not exist to 'define' or 'legitimise' service designing within industry or the academy or anywhere else. In fact, if we ever do define or legitimise the practice in any particularly robust way, that probably means it's time to call it a day as our best days will probably be behind us and we should be off looking for the next frontier in design.
10. Servicedesiging.org does exist to explore, prod, provoke and inspire a reflective practice amongst service designers from all backgrounds and disciplines wherever they are and however they're servicedesigning.
For now, servicedesigning.org is coordinated by the organisers of Service Design Drinks/Thinks London, but we are very open to new ideas around governance of the site and the organisation as the network grows. We see a future organisational structure being similar to that of IxDA.org and we welcome thoughts and support from the servicedesigning.org community about how the organisation should work. Right now the membership list is not exactly huge, so we'll cross that bridge if we ever come to it.
There is currently no charge or membership fee, and if the organisation ever decides to charge a membership fee or similar it will be strictly to support running costs of any infrastructure such as the servicedesigning.org website, but we don't see this happening in the near future, and certainly not unless we become a much bigger organisation. That would be a nice problem to have.