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Call for Students - Season of Usability 2008
2008 March, 17th

We are proud to announce the Season of Usability 2008, a series of projects for students of usability, user interface design, interaction design and related.

We accept 10 students for design tasks, user research and UI analysis. The openings represent a wide range of applications, such as instant messaging, office suites, web applications and the One Laptop Per Child desktop.

See the full list of openings on the official website: Season of Usability - Project Openings 2008

Design and User Experience Track at Drupalconf
2008 February, 11th

The next Drupalcon, the twice-yearly gathering of the content management platform Drupal, will take place in Boston from March 3, 2008 to March 6, 2008.

A wide variety of usability issues will be discussed in the Design and User Experience Track. Major goals of the track are to attract more designers and improve Drupal's visual design.

Session propsals are still open and comprise graphic design, theming, usability and interaction design, site planning and information architecture. Some of them are organised by our Season of Usability student, Bevan Rudge.

Season of Usability: Call for Projects
2008 February, 3rd

Season of Usability is a series of sponsored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design to get involved with Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS). During a 3 to 6 month collaboration, students work together with an experienced usability mentor and key developers of the project to improve the user experience of a FLOSS application. The next Season of Usability with 8 student projects will start in Spring 2008.

FLOSS Projects who would like to benefit from a usability student are encouraged to fill in our Call for Projects questionnaire:

>> Season of Usability 2008 - Call for Projects Questionnaire (available till February 20th)

For further details, please see the Call for Projects page on the Season of Usability website.

Drupal Student Project Kicked Off
2008 January, 6th

In the scope of our Season of Usability programme, another student project has just been kicked off: Bevan Rudge, a student of computer science at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, is going to support the content management platform Drupal usability-wise. The major focus of this student project will be user interface improvements for the Drupal core, for item management and local navigation, as well as writing a usability guide for developers.

We want to thank CivicActions who co-sponsor this student project.

Read the whole story on the Season of Usability website !

Where Open Source meets Usability

Open Usability. OpenUsability is an initiative that promotes usability in free and open source software (F/OSS) development. Aiming to become an online community that connects usability people and F/OSS developers, provides usability resources and a platform to discuss usability issues on a expert level, OpenUsability today is a group of people who share the same mindset of an "Open Usability": Make usability transparent, share methods and best practices, and support open source software.

Members. OpenUsability has to two major groups of members: F/OSS Developers and usability. Usability contributors mostly come from usability, UI design, interaction design or related. They are independent specialists who contribute to OpenUsability with a non-commercial background, but often to probe their skills and provide show cases. Interested usability specialists and students are encouraged to get in touch with us and participate. For students, there is also a yearly programme of sponsored student projects.
Get in touch

Activities.The OpenUsability activities are widespread and range from short- and longterm support of projects to presence at developer summits, Linux fairs or usability conferences.
More about activities

Show Cases. The successful integration of usability with F/OSS projects is illustrated along the examples of KDE, GIMP, TV Browser and the Season of Usability project GeeXBoX.
See show cases

Projects. In the past, F/OSS projects could register on OpenUsability to ask for usability support. Due to a lack of usability people, this feature is currently disabled. To discuss usability issues, developers can visit our IRC channel (irc.freenode.org#openusability). Usability who are interested to work in a F/OSS project please browse the registered projects.
Browse projects

Season of Usablity. During a 3 month collaboration, students of usability, user interface design, interaction design or related participate in FLOSS projects, mentored by an experienced member of OpenUsability. You can follow the progress on the related website.

Season of Usability 2008 takes place from April to July 2008. It is kindly sponsored by