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CHI 2010 FLOSS HCI Workshop
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Participants
For the full list of participants, including their submissions, please go to the internal Participants page.
- Ivanka Majic, Canonical
- Charline Poirier, Canonical
- Claudia Muller-Birn, Carnegie Mellon University
- Tobias Schwartz, Fraunhofer
- Celeste Lyn Paul, KDE
- Alex Faaborg, Mozilla
- Jono Xia, Mozilla
- Jinghua Zhang, Mozilla
- Clinton Freeman, National ICT Australia
- Daniel Schwartz, Oracle
- Carlos Jensen, Oregon State
- Victor Kuechler, Oregon State
- Máirín Duffy, Red Hat
- Paula Bach, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne
- Parmit Chilana, University of Washington
- Andrew J. Ko, University of Washington
- Morgan Dixon, University of Washington
- James Fogarty, University of Washington
- Adam Fourney, University of Waterloo
- Ben Lafreniere, University of Waterloo
- Michael Terry, University of Waterloo
Original Call
In the past 10 years, Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) has become a ubiquitous and vital force in business, education, government, and research. However, despite its prominence, the CHI community has been slow to study and partner with this community.
This workshop will focus on identifying the key differences between usability/user experience (UX) practices in FLOSS environments and industrial software production, how these differences can (or should) impact the design of tools and practices for usability/UX in FLOSS development, and the development of new theoretical approaches to CHI in the FLOSS community. Importantly, an overarching goal of the workshop is to bring these two communities together to explore collaboration opportunities. More specifically, this workshop will raise awareness of the opportunities the FLOSS community and its software offer the CHI community, and develop an agenda for future research at the intersection of FLOSS and CHI.
The workshop invites both experienced practitioners and researchers in the CHI and FLOSS communities. Applicants should submit one of the following in a two-page conference publication format:
- A case study describing experiences in introducing and/or practicing usability/UX in a FLOSS development context
- A summary of research conducted in the FLOSS community related to the workshop’s theme (for example, understanding motivation of designers in FLOSS, mapping design conversations, design tools and methods used in FLOSS, etc.)
Submissions should use the template at at the conference website. Position paper submissions will be available on this wiki as a reference material before and after the workshop.
The (extended) submission deadline is January 6, 2010. Submissions and questions should be sent to flosshci@gmail.com.
Workshop Organizers
Paula Bach (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
Michael Terry (University of Waterloo, Canada)
Full Workshop Proposal
For reference, the complete workshop proposal can be found below.
Abstract
In the past 10 years, Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) has become a potent enabler in all areas of computing. Despite its rise in importance, the CHI community has been slow to study and partner with the FLOSS community. This workshop will join researchers and practitioners from the CHI and FLOSS communities to establish an agenda for future research and collaboration between the two communities.
Introduction
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.
Workshop Goals and Issues
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. In particular, this workshop will join individuals from the CHI and FLOSS communities to flesh out a research agenda in the following problem areas:
- Research methods for studying the FLOSS community
- Explicating cultures of practice in FLOSS with respect to CHI concerns
- Developing HCI tools and methods catering to the FLOSS community and its unique cultures of practice
- Leveraging the FLOSS community as a test-bed for performing large-scale research with high ecological validity
We briefly explain each problem area.
The FLOSS community is an extremely diverse community, where individual projects range from geographically distributed volunteer-run projects to commercial software companies. Practices in this community also vary greatly, with some projects employing highly transparent development methods, and other projects working behind closed doors. At the same time, members of the FLOSS community are highly accessible compared to individuals in closed-source software companies. For example, most FLOSS project members’ names and email addresses are readily available. However, unlike closed-source companies, there are rarely “gatekeepers” that control access to these individuals. As a consequence, researchers need to exercise greater care in its dealings with the community to avoid overwhelming the community. Given these factors, it is essential to develop a research tool box and guidelines for studying this community that recognizes its diversity and respects its unique features to ensure a fruitful, long-term collaborative relationship.
While the FLOSS community is a rich, diverse community, it is often conceptualized as a homogenous group of like-minded individuals sharing a common body of practices. Given this common misconception, it is vital for the CHI community to more thoroughly study and describe the FLOSS community, particularly through the lenses relevant to the CHI community, such as perceptions of usability, design practices, interface evaluations, etc. In this workshop, we will map out these key areas of study that lie at the intersection of the two communities.
Arguably, the tools and methods developed to support HCI concerns have, for the last 30 years, been driven by commercial concerns – the desire to sell computational artifacts, software, and services. This implicit motivating force has not been recognized within the CHI community. Similarly, the corresponding biases inherent in the CHI community’s tools and practices have not been identified. However, these biases have significant implications for the FLOSS community as it adopts usability and user experience tools and practices. Accordingly, there is a need to consider, with fresh eyes, how HCI might be best supported in this community of practice. There is also a real need to explore how the unique features of this community, its software, and software licenses can be leveraged to address user needs in ways not possible in closed source development.
Finally, the FLOSS community is comprised of an enthusiastic bunch of individuals, many of whom are eager to adopt and try new things. The FLOSS community has also produced a wide range of software, including office suites, graphics applications, integrated development environments (IDEs), statistical software packages, and high-end 3D animation packages. This software is mature, stable, feature-rich, and comparable to commercial alternatives. Given this combination of enthusiastic user base and mature software with accompanying source code, there is an opportunity to conduct CHI research within the FLOSS community at scales that are typically only possible within closed-source software companies. More fully utilizing this potential will help push HCI research out of small-scale, convenience testing into much more realistic, ecologically valid environments.
Summary of Workshop Goals
The workshop will bring together a diverse group of researchers and practitioners from the FLOSS and CHI communities to establish a concrete research agenda for studying the FLOSS community, developing tools and methods for the community, and collaborating to solve shared problems.
References
[1] Bach, P. M., Kirschner, B., and Carroll, J. M. 2007. Usability and free/libre/open source software SIG: HCI expertise and design rationale. In CHI '07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, CA, USA, April 28 - May 03, 2007). CHI '07. ACM, New York, NY, 2097-2100.
[2] Bach, P. M., DeLine, R., and Carroll, J. M. 2009. Designers wanted: participation and the user experience in open source software development. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 985-994.
[3] Benson, C., Muller-Prove, M., and Mzourek, J. 2004. Professional usability in open source projects: GNOME, OpenOffice.org, NetBeans. In CHI '04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vienna, Austria, April 24 - 29, 2004). CHI '04. ACM, New York, NY, 1083-1084.
[4] French Education Ministry: http://www.osor.eu/news/fr-education-ministry-encourages-open-source-use.
[5] Frishberg, N., Dirks, A. M., Benson, C., Nickell, S., and Smith, S. 2002. Getting to know you: open source development meets usability. In CHI '02 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, April 20 - 25, 2002). CHI '02. ACM, New York, NY, 932-933.
[6] Grassmuck, V. LiMux -- Free Software for Munich. In, "The Politics of Open Source Adoption." Joe Karaganis, Robert Latham (eds.). Social Science Research Council, May 2005. http://waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de/Grassmuck/Texts/Limux.html.
[7] Green, C., Tollinger, I., Ratterman, C., Pyrzak, G., Eiser, A., Castro, L., and Vera, A. 2009. Leveraging open-source software in the design and development process. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI EA '09. ACM, New York, NY, 3061-3074.
[8] Open Source Initiative: http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd.
[9] Paul, C. 2009. A Survey of Usability Practices in Free/Libre/Open Source Software. In The Fifth International Conference on Open Source Systems. C. Boldyreff et al. (Eds.): OSS 2009, IFIP AICT 299, 2009. Skovde, Sweden, June 3-6, Springer, Berlin, 264-273.
[10] Reitmayr, E., Balazs, B. and Muhlig, J. 2006. Integrating Usability with Open Source Software Development: Case Studies from the Initiative OpenUsability. In Toward Open Source Software Adoption: educational, public, legal, and usability practices, June 10, 2006, B. Ozel, C.B. Cilingir and K. Erkan, Eds. Como, Italy.
[11] Schwartz, D. and Gunn, A. 2009. Integrating user experience into free/libre open source software: CHI 2009 special interest group. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI EA '09. ACM, New York, NY, 2739-2742.
[12] Terry, M., Kay, M., Van Vugt, B., Slack, B., and Park, T. 2008. Ingimp: introducing instrumentation to an end-user open source application. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 607-616.
