about free interaction design for your open source project

[Matthew Jadud]

Hi Boudewijn,

On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 04:34, Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:
> I'm Boudewijn Rempt, the maintainer of Krita (http://www.krita.org), a painting application for digital artists. It's a project with a largish team of developers and artists who give feedback on our application. We've recently gone through a session defining vision for our application with Peter Sikking (who has also worked on the Gimp), and we're really interested in improving the interaction design of our application and we would love to work together with one of your students.

That looks awesome. I haven't had any responses from apps of this
sort, so thank you! Krita adds a nice dimension to the possible
choices for the students.

> As a project, we've got quite a bit of experience working with students, for instance during the Google Summer of Code, and I have been a mentor to a group of about a dozen students in Bangalore who were working on a related project, the mobile version of KOffice, FreOffice.

The nice thing about what I'm proposing is that we won't be as
"heavyweight" as a GSoC student. That is, I'm here running the class
and providing local support, so any mechanics (eg. interacting with
particular tools, getting things set up, etc.) can be handled locally.

So you have a sense for what's going on at my end, we're going to be
starting the semester tomorrow, and my rough plan is as follows:

1. The students will do a rapid pass through the design and testing
process on a website project.

2. While rapidly touring the breadth of UI design and testing, we'll
learn about interacting with communities via IRC, blogs, mailing
lists, bug trackers, wikis, and the like.

3. My expectation is that they will look at the available projects and
begin approaching the communities/projects they're most interested in
working with by mid-to-late September, and we will then use the
remainder of the semester to focus in on software UIs.

While I have taught this kind of course before, it is the first time
I've experimented with putting it in the context of a living, open
source project. That said, I want to be clear: I'm well aware of how
open source software development works, and the students will be, too.
We do not believe our contributions will *necessarily* result in
changes in your project. We only ask for the opportunity to work in a
community context where the students' explorations will not come as a
surprise, and their work will be given a bit of consideration along
the way. And who knows: they might decide to keep working on the
project past the end of the term, which I would consider a win for all
involved!

My most sincere thanks. I'll drop a note shortly pointing you at the
(hopefully up-to-date) course website, and let you know how we're
getting on.

Cheers,
Matt