This is a great initiative. I wish there was a site that could match designers or UX people with open source projects. I am surprised that something like this doesn't exist. Are these two camps a little bit weary or suspicious of each other?
We're really excited about that, too, and if you join the IRC channel, we'll do our best to connect you with a project.
Additionally, I wrote this:
http://opensource-usability.blogspot.com/2013/12/guest-post-...
that I would love your thoughts on.
When it comes to UX, I don't believe you can design by committee, but everyone feels they should have a say in the process (and if you've contributed to the code of a project, you probably feel an even stronger sense of ownership which is perfectly natural and understandable). As soon as someone feels their UX suggestions are ignored, it causes so much resentment. The result is often a distrustful and even resentful relationship between design and development. This is such a familiar scenario in the Open Source community particularly for large Open Source projects.
Here's a small example from the Blender community that illustrates the difficulty in reconciling different views about UX. It's a Youtube video of a presentation at the 2013 Blender Conference (Oct 2013) on improving the Blender UI. In the Q&A after the presentation, one audience member (rightfully) says we shouldn't treat users as idiots, but then adds that making Blender easier to use might entail "dumbing down" the app - this elicits a round of applause from the audience. Dependending on your point of view, that's a perfectly legitimate concern or a depressing misunderstanding about ease-of-use: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aIA2LaB2Iw&feature=share&t=3...
My impression is that there's a fractious relationship between design/UX and development in the open source community that hasn't changed much over the years (I'm not pinning the blame on any one camp). How to solve this, I just don't know. I'm glad that we're having a debate about it and it would be good to hear more from other developers and designers on this subject.