2012 – A good year for the user experience of Free Software?
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 by Björn BalazsI haven’t been blogging for a long time. To give you some short reason for that: After almost 6 years I have decided to leave Apliki, the company I once co-founded. This process was a little time-consuming but is finished now.
Why could that be of interest for you?
- I will be much more engaged in the usability of Free Software projects in future.
Next to the work I have been doing and will continue to do for Tine 2.0, I already teamed up much closer with the KDE and the LibreOffice community. And I am actually still looking for more challenging projects from the Free Software World. - I will try to re-animate OpenUsability.org.
I care a lot about this initiative. It tries to accomplish two things: First it helps to provide Usability Competence to Free Software projects. Secondly it tries to make process and work done in usability more transparent, so more people can benefit from it. Sad enough, this project is basically dead at the moment, but I want to work to re-animate it again (And you are happily invited to help re-building the structures we need to fulfill our duty!). - I will free a software for user integration.
Over the years at my old company, we have been developing a web based tool that helps to integrate users into the development process of software. I am currently working to release this software under the aGPL (Again, you are happily invited to join and support me in this effort).
So whether you
- have a special project and want to improve its user experience or
- would like to help building up structures to make usability work better for free software projects in general or
- are interested in supporting a free software project with your usability skills, but have no clue how to start:
Simply drop me a line (b [at] lazs [dot] de) or talk to me directly at FOSDEM.
2012 will definitely be a good year for Usability and User Experience of Free Software! Join to make it even better!
