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Rajanen, M., Iivari, N. (2013)
Open Source and Human Computer Interaction Philosophies in Open Source
Projects - Incompatible or Co-Existent? In Proceedings of the
Academic MindTrek 2013. Tampere, Finland. ISBN: 978-1-4503-1992-8, DOI:
10.1145/2523429.2523463
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Abstraxt
The importance of introducing usability activities into open source
software (OSS) development has been acknowledged in the research
literature; however, there is a lack of research examining the
compatibility and actual co-existence of the philosophies of OSS and Human
Computer Interaction (HCI), guiding usability research and practice, in
OSS projects. This paper fills in this gap through an empirical
examination of two OSS projects into which usability activities were
introduced. The results show that in these cases the usability specialists
embraced aspects of both philosophies; hence, these philosophies
coexisted. However, the usability specialists either 'became them' or
'were close while kept the distance'. In both cases the usability
specialists aligned their work with the OSS philosophy. However, through
this alignment, in the other case they become very immersed in the OSS
project, encountering a risk of becoming misaligned with the core HCI
philosophy. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Keywords
Human Computer Interaction, Open Source Software, Usability
BibTeX entry
@inproceedings{Rajanen2013Mindtrek,
author = {Rajanen, Mikko and Iivari, Netta},
title = {Open Source and Human Computer Interaction Philosophies in Open
Source Projects: Incompatible or Co-Existent?},
booktitle = {AcademicMindTrek '13: Proceedings of International
Conference on Making Sense of Converging Media},
year = {2013},
isbn = {978-1-4503-1992-8},
pages = {67--74},
location = {Tampere, Finland},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2523429.2523463},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
keywords = {Human Computer Interaction, Open source software, Usability},
}
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