Parsons school of design teaches webdesign for and with open source software. Students learn to work with indexhibit and wordpress asking questions such as: How do we learn and how can we teach through interface? What is the role of design in the open source world? And how can we give back to this new collaborative movement?
On the day he was named as president of RISD, John Maeda launched an internal blog on which everyone there can talk openly to him about the school. Maeda addressed the moral responsibility of designers. He stressed the importance of transparency in design, and of extending the participatory "open source" development process now popular in software design to other sectors. He maintained that although keeping secrets creates the illusion of power, if nobody knows you have a secret, its value is worthless.