I'll be giving a seminar in Brussels on December 1st, about F/OSS usability. Main topics of talk will be on:

• Definition of usability
• Making a software usable: developer’s point of view
• Issues of working with developers
• Collaborative media servers helping usability awarenes
• Main points of online project management
• Interaction patterns between human-computer interaction experts and developers
• How does open source usability differ from institutionalized usability?·
• Analysis of a recent survey of OSS usability people

Date: December 1, 2007

Time: 12:00-13:00

Place: La Bellone, Rue de Flandre, 46 1000 Bruxelles

For the organization web page, click here .

3 years ago, when men were men, I was interested in being a producer - yes, a TV producer whose aim is to make a series of TV shows featuring open source software and Linux. With Dinçer Karaca, we have organized world's 1st Linux TV show with 13 episodes, each of them shown weekly on Technology Channel. It was a great success at that time because the programme included many surprises - once a penguin rushed into the stage and in another recording we rolled on the floor laughing, don't remember why now. We have given many nice gifts to our audience who were able to answer a basic question and what's more, each week we had a distinct guest. Dinçer and I hosted experienced people from Oracle, IBM, Linux Users Association, BEA, HP, you name it. Very fun days indeed... Here's a link showing an interview with Sinan Gürkan of AmigaOS. Unfortunately all the past recordings were harmed because of an accident (I was told so from the vp). 

One more link featuring another interview in SkyTurk.

OpenOffice.org community holds and event each year in one of the cities, this year in Barcelona between 19-21 September. As marketing lead and l10n team lead of Turkey, I was able to make the one in Koper, Slovenia, however Barcelona event unfortunately coincided with another event. This meant losing the opportunity to see the live presentations - but wait, the video recordings of the conference is already on the web page (see Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Among the presentations, I find the following nice to hear, and highly recommend to anyone else who are willing to know more about OpenOffice.org project:

1. Keynote: OpenOffice.org 3.0 and beyond by Louis Suarez Potts, community manager of OpenOffice.org

2. Who's using OpenOffice.org , by Erwin Tenhumberg from Sun Microsystems. 

3. How to fix an issue in OpenOffice.org - a bit more technical, but worth reading 

Unfortunately Barbara Held's presentation is one of the most interesting ones out there, but lacking a link to the document. She's talked about the ongoing activities and projects at European level and explains the policy background. If you happen to see the doc on the street, please tell it to come to me. 

Other interesting presentations include:

1. ODF in mobile devices

2. The missing piece in OpenOffice.org: Thunderbird/Lightning

PS: Some of the presentations - luckily those who are really worth having a look - is missing from the web page and I've been informed they'll be located appropriately.

Dear usability expert & F/OSS developer,

We are inviting you to participate in a doctorate study that investigates how developers and HCI experts work in a collaborative project. You will be asked to answer a set of questions regarding F/OSS projects you take part in. Your participation in this survey will provide information that could be used to improve how HCI experts and developers interact in a F/OSS project.

Online survey takes only 15 minutes to complete and will allow us to have an understanding of interaction patterns among project participants.

If you are a F/OSS developer, click here

If you are usability expert, click here .

in order to complete this short survey. Please circulate this email to your friends and contacts so that we can have the widest possible feedback.

Note: demographic inputs of this study will be kept strictly confidential, i.e your name and any other private data will not appear anywhere publicly.

Many thanks for your participation and help!

Those who has a TV at home, probably deploys a set top box of some kind, again probably having a satellite dish, DVB-T tuner or such. It even starts to become messy as you buy one of those D-Smart, Digiturk, DivX player all at one place, scattered around your (already messy) living room.

Now VESTEL is introducing another concept - all-in-one TV which includes a Linux base set top box device. It can connect to internet, letting you read e-mails, watch YouTube videos, login to Flickr, read your e-mails, read USB disks/flash disks and even login to UPNP devices online via wired/wireless network. This is a new, innovative concept when it comes to merging TV and STB, without the hassle to connect yet another device to your TV. 

What is more, all these things run on Linux, and everything you see on the screen from ground up is coded with a bunch of talented coders in Istanbul. The project is becoming a lot entertaining since it introduces new and very challenging issues which need to be solved. 

Those who wish to have a try a demo, just wave to VESTEL booth during Cebit 2007 between 2-7 October, 2007.

Actions for the last two weeks:

• Read: some articles from Open Source Enterprise Magazine and Intel OSS page
• Got happy with wow factor: French education ministry completes migration to Red Hat
  
• Read: "Improbable" by Adam Fawer and "Brain games: Conspiracy theories" by Erol Mütercimler
  
• Seen: Graz, Austria. Subaction: Taken photo, seen the monuments, wandered around and shopped
• Worked on: An embedded Linux project and trusted computing
• Studied: Trusted platform module internals
• Visited: Relatives in Izmir, friends in Eregli (Zonguldak)
• Listened to: Eighties songs from Youtube
• Saddened by: Closing of IT Business Weekly magazin
• Deleted: Too much spam
• Eaten: (Censored)
  

Springer Verlag has published my two papers in its LNCS series for HCI International Conference 2007. I've uploaded the original papers (as they appear in proceedings) in opensource.mit.edu . Links are here (an analysis of involvement of HCI experts in distributed software development: practical issues) and here (out of box issues of free and open source software).

• Back from Beijing, China. Photos updated in Flickr. 
• Spent over 5 hours in 80ler.com (eighties in English). Highly recommended.
  
• I'll be in Graz, Austria between 3-8 September for OPEN TC project. 
• While got 13.5 points over 15 for OPEN INITIATIVE project, we lost the call for 7FP Call 1. Congratulations to UNI MERIT.
  
• Planning a (very) long trip covering Kuala Lumpur, Sydney and New Zealand between October-September.
• Sent an article to ACM Interactions with my advisor. Expecting to see the in special issue of usability in open source software in November-December.
• This is my 60th day without a TV. We broke up :-D
• Still writing my  thesis..

• 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.