User:JDavis

Janet Davis is the founding computer scientist at Whitman College. Yes, she is very busy. She has a homepage at Whitman.

Janet has prior experience teaching software development with community-based projects in her former role at Grinnell College. She is concerned this model may not be sustainable in a department of three faculty and is therefore exploring other models for community-engaged software development.

Reflections on User-Centered Design & Open-Source Software Development

My research is in human-computer interaction (HCI), and I regularly teach user-centered design (UCD). I've also come to regularly teach a software development course. You'd think these things would be entirely compatible, but in fact there are some deep conflicts between the approaches.

I've long been aware of the tensions between agile software development and the user-centered design process. They share the practice of iterative design and development. But where agile says start coding as quickly as possible, user-centered design indicates that you must, at least, have a conceptual model that is well-grounded in understanding the target users and domain. I have made my own contribution to resolving this tension, and I think there is work towards a consensus that designing and validating a conceptual model is part of the practice of doing Just Enough Design Initially.

Reading excerpts from Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar has made me aware of a tension between the underlying values of UCD and open-source software (OSS). Raymond writes in The Social Context of Open-Source Software:

18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.

This stands in sharp contrast with the first principle of UCD:

You are not your user.

This is meant to emphasize that what makes sense to you as the software developer, what is useful to you, may not be useful or what makes sense to the people (usually other people) who will benefit from using your software.

I can see both sides of it. If software is useful to you, yes, chances are good it will be useful to other people as well, and there is value in sharing it. And if there is a need, there should be enough people empowered to develop software that someone in the open-source community is working on fulfilling that need. But it's impossibly idealist to assume it is.

I'm going to channel my students and say I find these historical readings not inspiring but problematic. What have women and other people from outside the dominant software culture written about open-source software?

Intro IRC Activity

1. How do people interact? Very easily. Darci seems to be in charge of the meeting. She introduces the topics ("updates", "next steps") and records the minutes using the meetbot. From a not-too-careful skim, it looks like everyone takes turns stating their updates and next steps. There is a conversation about each person's updates as others ask questions or offer advice.
2. What is the pattern of communication? Is it linear or branched? Formal or informal? One-to-many, one-to-one or a mix? The conversation is branched, informal, and a mix of one-to-many and one-to-one. Sometimes one person holds the floor for several turns.
3. Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning? The meetbot commands - #startmeeting, #topic, #info, #action, #link, #endmeeting
4. Can you make any other observations? I noticed that john_ has an underscore_ after his name. Is this transcript recorded from his perspective? - Yes. And does "* john_" indicate a private thought rather or a public utterance about oneself in the third person? Also, this is interesting: "18:31:39 <Stoney> (sorry person at door... i'm back... reading)" I think he wrote this because Heidi had just asked him a question but he needed some time to answer it.
5. Bonus question: Why didn't Heidi and Darci's actions get picked up by the meetbot? The meetbot seems to be case sensitive. Their usernames were typed incorrectly, with a capital letter ("Heidi", "Darci" instead of "heidi", "darci")

I observed the Ushahidi IRC channel (#ushahidi on Freenet). I found a grad school classmate there, Pat. I tried to start a private conversation, and wrote a public message by accident. I asked if there was much going on, and she invited me to join the Ushahidi skype group. There were a lot more people connected to the Skype channel than to the IRC channel, but still no conversation. About 24 hours later I got an invitation to join the Ushahidi group on HipChat as a guest.

I joined the #sahana-eden channel also.

I tried joining #mousetrap on irc.gnome.org. I found a bot and Kevin Brown. Not much going on. I also joined the Gnome accessibility channel, #a11y.

I finally joined the foss2serve group in hopes of observing something. It was totally quiet! I wonder if I would have seen more if I'd been able to observe on a weekend.