about free interaction design for your open source project

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Wednesday 25 August 2010, Matthew Jadud wrote:
> 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.

:-) I thought that the MyPaint team also intended to contact you, btw.

> > 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.

Cool!

> 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.

Looks like a good plan to me :-)

> 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!

That would be great indeed! 

> 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.

great, thanks!
-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org