Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

I’m a little sad that the stuff I do at work has to do with backends and analysis and little to do with HCI, the area within computer science that I got my degree. So when I learned about the Free/Libre/Open Source Usability Sprint (FLOSS) taking place in the San Francisco, I fired off an email expressing interest in the event.

The idea is of the event is to pair up usability people with open source developers, run some usability tests, and make changes to the code based on the findings. Goals for the event include educating developers about usability and educating usability experts about OSS projects.

The event sounds like a lot of fun, unfortunately, I found out about it too late. I already had plans for this weekend and can’t make the time commitment (I would have if my plans didn’t involve other people). Alas, I will have to wait for the next FLOSS usability sprint and may have to settle for seeing the talk on What Was Learned from the First Open Source Usability Sprint.

Coincidentally, there is a talk going on next Monday at UIUC about The Usability of Open Source Software.