Last weekend, Google hosted the third
FLOSS Usability
Sprint, an event designed to bring together User Experience professionals and open
source developers to collaborate and improve OS projects. The two
facilitators,
Allen "Gunner" Gunn and
Eugene Eric
Kim, quickly made all the participants feel welcomed and engaged. Allen
and Eugene then paired developers with the
UX practitioners
in attendance and we were off and running, pausing only for reports back to the group on our
progress and, of course, lunch!
The team from
SocialtextOpen found that their new, simplified interface
left their more advanced users feeling information withdrawl. They spent their
weekend concentrating on building a user interface for their immersive wiki users while
simultaneously putting the finishing touches on their next product release. Another
team worked on enhancing the usability of
HyperScope, a project laying the groundwork for
Douglas
Engelbart's vision of an
Open Hyperdocument System. The
Social Source
Commons group focused on removing extraneous elements from their website to make the
site more navigable and useful for those doing IT support for non-profits. The
Sustainable Civil Society project, a wiki-like
project to create a map of organizations devoted to sustainability, wowed us with an excercise
in creating affinity diagrams and left the sprint under a new moniker, Wiser
Earth.
I was fortunate enough to spend the weekend with four
developers from the
Drupal
project, reviewing the results of their user survey and creating the framework for a report on
improving usability in Drupal. The report will be published to the entire Drupal
community, and in the interim
Kieran Lal of
CivicSpace has posted a
write up of our
activities this weekend. Thanks to Kieran,
Neil Drumm,
Matt Cheney and
Zack Rosen for the deeper introduction to the wonderful world of
Drupal.
Eugene has posted a
Sprint write
up and you can also check out a
group photo of all the particpants wearing our best scary
Hallowe'en
faces.
Last but not least, the open source world needs UX
experts! If you're interested in helping, you can find more information on the
FLOSS Usability
project's site.
