Draft specifications for OpenUsability.org

[Jan Muehlig]

Hi,

Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> I had a look at www.openusability.org and it already looks great. Some 
> of the action of the first round described in the draft seem to already 
> be done. That's good so we can proceed to get something done.

The current portal was set up by Jutta in a few hours, in PostNuke. 
PostNuke's structur (as far is I know) is function based, not project 
based. In the next step, we need something that is project based (as 
described in the draft). There may be a chance that PostNuke has a 
module that offers this, but it is not really checked yet. Alternatives 
coult be Zope or others. The question is: does it make sense to modify 
an existing platform or to write something from (nearly) scratch. 
Suggestions highly welcomed.


> 
> One comment about the assumptions 1.) of the draft: I think you would 
> gain better acceptance by programmers if you don't assume that 
> programmers aren't capable of performing usability tests. That could be 
> seen as one variant of the prejudice between programmers and usability 
> people, that programmers have no clue about usability.
> 
We never meant to say that developers are not capable of doing usability 
tests (although some methodological background is no harm). What we 
meant is that developers (assumption? need statistics) rather prefer to 
do programming that to do testing. However, we will clarify this in the 
draft.

> 
>>Another issue is that the draft does not limit the scope to KDE, but
>>to OSS. The reason why I think we should label it OpenUsability is
>>that it is (again) more accessible for usability people (an
>>alternative label/URL could be UseForge.org).
> 
> 
> In my view OpenUsability is the perfect title for this project.
Fine
> 
>>Nevertheless I think that KDE is (one of) the most active OSS
>>projects with respect to usability. Hence I hope that KDE maintainers
>>and the whole usability group of KDE take the platform as a neutral
>>ground which can be easility integrated into KDE development.
> 
> 
> Is the portal already ready for content being added? I was missing the 
> usability reports Ellen posted a couple of days ago there. Does it 
> already make sense to register and add project information? I would 
> like to add something about KOrganizer and Kontact.
> 
As Datschge pointed out, we need a standard. The KDE-report format 
(developed by Aaron?) is pretty good, but the XML makes some trouble. 
The platform can currently not cope with XML, so either we get this 
fixed or we have to change the format until we find a solution. 
Therefore please wait for the next mail from Ellen where she gives more 
details. After that, start publishing!

Tx,
Jan