Archive for the ‘Open Source’ Category

Rise of the Net-Native Class

October 3, 2007

Welcome back to a new school year. We are now resuming regular meetings and corresponding blog reports on each conversation.

The “Net Native”

Bob presented preliminary work on the rise of the “Digital Native” or “Net Native” and their impact on the workplace. There is a new class of employees on the rise. They have particular characteristics that are different from employees before and are conflicting with existing work practices and other structures. These people are the “Digital Natives” or “Net Natives”.

Bob’s group has begun to investigate the characteristics of these people and to model their impact on knowledge management in the company structure.

During this research conversation, a majority of the audience’s questions challenged Bob on the scope of his generalizations and relevance of his focus on “Net Native”. This summary will briefly summarize Bob’s findings and then summarize the discussion. I encourage you to chime in via comments.

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FLOSS Usability: Supporting HCI Expertise with Design Rationale

June 1, 2007

http://port25.technet.com
flossusability.ist.psu.edu

Bryan Kirschner and Paula Bach

CONTEXT:

From the open source lab in Microsoft (yes, Microsoft!). You could call their interest a small slice of open-source: “money-driven” open source (how do open source policies bring value to an organization?). To address this interest, it is in the interest of Microsoft to gain an understanding of the open source movement.

RESEARCH QUESTION:

What is the role of HCI expertise in FLOSS development?
Consider that Firefox, as an open-source project, is widely-considered one of the most usable pieces of software. How did this come to pass, what kinds of design rationale went into the production of such a usable browser?

Paula presents a research plan where she will investigate the above question and then produce a tool to support usuability within the design.

A Lively Conversation Thus Ensued

(peppered liberally with sharp criticism for MS Word of which have been censored from the transcript below) (more…)