• An Analysis of Involvement of HCI Experts in Distributed Software Development: Practical Issues by Çetin, Verzulli and Frings
• Out of Box Experience Issues of Free and Open Source Software by Göktürk and Çetin

Both papers will published by Springer Verlag. However, I also tried to post the papers to opensource.mit.edu with no luck. Upload mechanism didn't allow me to post the papers, and the maintaners were in vacation.

More news as I return back from Bejing in August.

Daha sonra gelen düzenleme: Bu çalıştayda yapılanlar ve konuşulanlar ilgili olarak Bora Güngören bir web günlüğü girdisi yayınladı 

Özgür ve açık kaynak kodlu yazılımlarla ilgili çalışma yapan yüksek lisans ve doktora öğrencileri Ankara'da toplanıyor. ODTÜ Bilgi İşlem Merkezi'nde düzenlenecek çalıştayda, konu ile ilgilenen kişiler bulgularını sunacak ve diğer araştırmacılarla görüş alış-verişinde bulunacaklar.

Toplantı sonunda, İstanbul'da Ekim-Kasım ayları arasında yapılacak uluslararası bir kolokyum/çalıştay planı üzerine de konuşulacak.

Tarih: 7 Temmuz 2007 Cumartesi
Saat: 13:00
Yer: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi
Bilgi İşlem Merkezi Feza Altınoğlu Salonu

Çalıştay bu alanda araştırma yapan 15 kişi ile sınırlı olacağından katılımcıların önceden isimlerini Altay Özaygen'e (ozaygen _at_ metu.edu.tr) bildirmesi gerekmektedir.

Another interesting shared media server is Flickr, which hosts millions of photos. Just like Youtube, usability community exploits the underlying framework Flickr gives, i.e with discussion threads and annotation pins. Flickr uses clusters (i.e usability, usercentereddesign, ux, interface etc) for categorizing the submissions. This form of grouping lets users see a set of blocks defined under a specific tag.

So why do people need Youtube and Flickr to post their findings, ideas and "hate submissions"? There are several reasons behind that.

• Youtube and flickr provides what current bug reporting systems do (can?) not
• People need different media to submit their bug reporting rationale
• People need to promote usability, user centered design, usability engineering and such parameters, and they don't just want to use blogs with limited feature sets.
• Organizations need to tell their customers that their product is not really awesome and fascinating, but also usable and not feature-bloated.
• Companies try to come up with some visionary comments in their CEO/CTO/CIO blogs. Since "usability sells", what items do you think is well suited for this kind of job? Usability, of course.

So what does Youtube offer? Let's have a look at some interesting links I recently harvested from Youtube lately.

• How eyetracking testing takes place. Some of these posts include the videos hotspot maps generated during the tests.
• A post from usabilitymagazine.com shows how a test subject fails (male, 31 yr old) to find the correct link to redeem his miles.
• Can you show how accessibility of web pages work?
• Cross dimensional gestural interaction techniques
• Special focus: Voting machines
• How can you perform a usability testing?
• A Pardus Linux user gives supplementary information in a bug report

I leave it to the reader to find out videos on how well a product performs in terms of usability (new Microsoft touchscreen product), German usability test video showing a paper prototype (or paper mockup), thinking aloud tests and amateur usability testings.

How about Flickr? I didn't have some time to check all Flickr for interesting posts, however the following can be quite interesting:

• Have fun: World Usability Day Cake
• Show me your poster
• Show the final part work of a paper prototype (Since paper prototyping needs time and re-iteration, it may not be suitable for videos)

While Flickr is A) less overhead, providing a fast response, B) suitable in showing the evident problems on a device C) usually used to show good usability experience, Youtube is A) rich in content (both video and audio), has tendency to show bad usability experiences or usability issues.

Putting some quantitative work in the ideas above, one can start with another research area.

Everything was smooth except the rain, which is unbearable when your hotel room is 20 meters away from the Mediterranean.

Author: Görkem Çetin
First edition: April 2007
ISBN: 978-975-02-0484-54
Publisher: Seckin Publishing
Price: 13,90 YTL
Number of pages: 243

Complete collection of 15 documents, comprising over 600 pages, sheds light on the general economic and social benefits of Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS). The reports propose ways to overcome national barriers of F/OSS adoption, discuss how to improve the usability of F/OSS in a distrubuted project development environment, outlin a F/OSS curriculum for educational purposes and offer hands-on tips on setting up a Linux laboratory for schools.

tOSSad project, led by Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, now tries to disseminate its results throughout various media to help leverage the F/OSS ecosystem in European countries. All tOSSad reports are available for download from www.tossad.org/publications. A readers guide provides a brief summary of the most important reports.

To see what Pakistani Linux gurus are up to, see here. Sorry for direct copying.

Enjoy.

I'll be in Bilgi University for Open Days Organization between 3-4 March, and then in Ankara for a workshop about information security (5-6 March). Meanwhile, my friend Lorenzo Pallara, who is working in CINECA (Italy) about set top boxes and embedded Linux for a long time, is visiting Istanbul. As opposed to my visitigin him Bologna, this time I'll take them to a good Bosphorus restaurant, having some RAKI and BALIK (yum!).