Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) is software whose license permits one to freely install, copy, and modify the software [8]. Examples of FLOSS include the Linux kernel, the KDE desktop, and the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). In the past 10 years, FLOSS has become an important, influential, and vital force in today’s society. Businesses, schools, and governments are increasingly adopting FLOSS to keep IT infrastructure costs down [4, 6], while a wide range of commercial products are now built on FLOSS, including Tivo’s digital video recorder, Apple’s OS X operating system, and the emerging netbook market. FLOSS’s freely available source code also enables world-class research in all scientific disciplines, including computer science, the biological sciences, physics, and mathematics. In short, FLOSS is a potent enabler for countless areas of daily life.
Despite the widespread impact of FLOSS on computing, the CHI community has been relatively slow to recognize, study, and partner with this new community. In 2002, a workshop first introduced the CHI community to FLOSS and CHI-related problems in the FLOSS community [5], while two SIGs, one in 2004 [3] and one in 2007 [1], provided explicit venues at CHI to join those interested in these research area. Most recently, a handful of papers focused on the FLOSS community have appeared in the proceedings of CHI 2008 and 2009 [12, 2]. CHI 2009 hosted several FLOSS related venues including an engineering community discussion on user experience in the open source community, another SIG [11] and a design case study [7]. Given the growing desire in the FLOSS community to improve its own usability practices (e.g., [9, 10]) and the increased interest in FLOSS in the CHI community, there is a real need to articulate and catalyze a research agenda that partners these two communities.
This workshop will gather research and practitioners to outline an agenda for future research and collaboration between the FLOSS and CHI communities. While past CHI workshops and SIGs have raised awareness of the FLOSS community, they have not articulated clear paths forward. Accordingly, this workshop will focus on identifying a clear set of research questions and collaboration opportunities.