Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

I went to a talk a couple days ago about by Eugene Eric Kim about Lessons Learned from the FLOSS Usability Sprint. The points I took away from the talk:

• Some forms of user testing are hard to conduct due to a distributed user base.
• We can open source usability. That is, some usability problems are common to applications (e.g., an admin page for a blog or CMS). Lessons learned from one user study should help future projects that have similar components. Taken further, one could try to create a usable frontend with interchangeable backends.
• What are the incentives for usability analysts to help open source projects? Eugene mentioned having public work that one can cite in a resume, but there must be more than that…

Overall, it seemed pretty successful. Real changes were made and people are still discussing the event and future steps.