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Getting to know you-- Usability Meets Open Source

CHI 2002 Workshop and SIG, Minneapolis USA, April 20th 2002

Calum Benson, Sun Microsystems Ireland

What is CHI?

CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) is the largest annual conference for usability folks, organised by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This year was CHI's 20th anniversary, and it was attended by nearly 2000 delegates, including famous names such as Jakob Neilsen, Donald Norman, Jared Spool and Ben Shneiderman. And of course, yours truly :o)

What was the workshop about?

Free and open source software is gaining acceptance more than ever before. However, few open source projects incorporate usability into their development lifestyle to the same extent as modern commercial software. The workshop was organised as a forum for usability students and professionals to discuss their issues and experiences with usability in open source projects, and to find ways of promoting the notion of usability within communities that haven't traditionally practised it.

A special interest group (SIG) session was also organised for later in the conference. This was open to all CHI delegates, as opposed to the workshop for which pre-conference registration was required.

The workshop was co-organised by Nancy Frishberg, Calum Benson, Suzanna Smith and Andrea Mankoski (all of Sun Microsystems), Anna Dirks (Ximian Inc.), and Seth Nickell (GNOME Usability Project). Unfortunately, because CHI2002 happened very soon after GUADEC3 in Spain, not everybody's budget allowed them to attend both, so only Nancy and I were able to make it to Minneapolis.

Here is the programme listing for the workshop, and here are the position papers that the attendees submitted.

What happened at the workshop?

Nine people attended on the day, including the two co-organisers. The fields represented were:

The organizers brought several topics for discussion. The participants were quite ready to share additional issues:

What happened at the SIG?

As well as most of the attendees from the earlier workshop, we had about another 30 attendees, representing companies such as Unisys, KPM, IBM, and French Air Traffic Control; and educational institutions such as the Open University, Sheffield-Hallham, UCBerkeley, U Michigan, U Cape Town, and U Paris Sud. We also attracted a couple of big cheeses from SIGCHI who were interested in promoting open source usability in industry journals and at the SIGCHI committee level.

As we introduced ourselves, we posed questions and stated our hopes and priorities for being involved in activities related to usability and open source software development.

Topics that came up where GNOME is already ahead of the game:

Some of the actions that people took away from the SIG were:

What impact could the workshop and SIG have on GNOME?

Some questions GNOME needs to ask itself:


CategoryUsability


2024-10-23 11:03