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Understanding knowledge sharing activities in free/open source software projects
- Journal of Systems and Software
, 2007
"... Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) projects are people-oriented and knowledge intensive software development environments. Many researchers focused on mailing lists to study coding activities of software developers. How expert software developers interact with each other and with non-developers in th ..."
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Cited by 32 (2 self)
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Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) projects are people-oriented and knowledge intensive software development environments. Many researchers focused on mailing lists to study coding activities of software developers. How expert software developers interact with each other and with non-developers in the use of community products have received little attention. This paper discusses the altruistic sharing of knowledge between knowledge providers and knowledge seekers in the Developer and User mailing lists of the Debian project. We analyze the posting and replying activities of the participants by counting the number of email messages they posted to the lists and the number of replies they made to questions others posted. We found out that participants interact and share their knowledge a lot, their positing activity is fairly highly correlated with their replying activity, the characteristics of posting and replying activities are different for different kinds of lists, and the knowledge sharing activity of self-organizing Free/Open Source communities could best be explained in terms of what we called ‘‘Fractal Cubic Distribution’ ’ rather than the power-law distribution mostly reported in the literature. The paper also proposes what could be researched in knowledge sharing activities in F/OSS projects mailing list and for what purpose. The research findings add to our understanding of knowledge sharing activities in F/OSS projects.
ingimp: Introducing Instrumentation to an End-User Open Source Application
"... Open source projects are gradually incorporating usability methods into their development practices, but there are still many unmet needs. One particular need for nearly any open source project is data that describes its user base, including information indicating how the software is actually used i ..."
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Cited by 19 (6 self)
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Open source projects are gradually incorporating usability methods into their development practices, but there are still many unmet needs. One particular need for nearly any open source project is data that describes its user base, including information indicating how the software is actually used in practice. This paper presents the concept of open instrumentation, or the augmentation of an open source application to openly collect and publicly disseminate rich application usage data. We demonstrate the concept of open instrumentation in ingimp, a version of the open source GNU Image Manipulation Program that has been modified to collect end-user usage data. ingimp automatically collects five types of data: The commands used, high-level user interface events, overall features of the user’s documents, summaries of the user’s general computing environment, and users ’ own descriptions of their planned tasks. In the spirit of open source software, all collected data are made available for anyone to download and analyze. This paper’s primary contributions lie in presenting the overall design of ingimp, with a particular focus on how the design addresses two prominent issues in open instrumentation: privacy and motivating use.
Participatory Usability: supporting proactive users
- Proceedings of 4th ACM SIGCHI NZ Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction (CHINZ'03
, 2003
"... After software has been released the opporttmities for users to influence development can often be limited. In this paper we review the research on post-deployment usability and make explicit its connections to open source software development. We describe issues involved in the design of end-user r ..."
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Cited by 14 (3 self)
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After software has been released the opporttmities for users to influence development can often be limited. In this paper we review the research on post-deployment usability and make explicit its connections to open source software development. We describe issues involved in the design of end-user reporting tools with reference to the Safari web browser and a digital library prototype.
Conceptual Modelling as a New Entry in the Bazaar: The Open Model Approach
, 2006
"... The present contribution proposes to transfer the main principles of open source software development to a new context: conceptual modelling; an activity closely related to software development. The goal of ..."
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Cited by 11 (3 self)
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The present contribution proposes to transfer the main principles of open source software development to a new context: conceptual modelling; an activity closely related to software development. The goal of
Users of Open Source Software - How Do They Get Help
- In Proc. of HICSS ’09
, 2009
"... A study was conducted across multiple open source software online technical help communities. This paper presents the types of discussions that occur, the types of questions asked and the type of responses that are given. The implications for socio-technical design are considered, exploring how help ..."
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Cited by 8 (0 self)
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A study was conducted across multiple open source software online technical help communities. This paper presents the types of discussions that occur, the types of questions asked and the type of responses that are given. The implications for socio-technical design are considered, exploring how help requests and discussions can be used to improve future help-giving, documentation and interface and functionality redesign. 1.
USABILITY IN OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: OPINIONS AND PRACTICE
"... Abstract. Open Source Software (OSS) development has gained significant importance in the production of software products. Open Source Software developers have produced systems with a functionality that is competitive with similar proprietary software developed by commercial software organizations. ..."
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Cited by 6 (2 self)
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Abstract. Open Source Software (OSS) development has gained significant importance in the production of software products. Open Source Software developers have produced systems with a functionality that is competitive with similar proprietary software developed by commercial software organizations. Yet OSS is usually designed for and by power-users, and OSS products have been criticized for having little or no emphasis on usability. We have conducted an empirical study of the developers ’ opinions about usability and the way usability engineering is practiced in a variety of OSS projects. The study included a questionnaire survey and a series of interviews, where we interviewed OSS contributors with both technical and usability backgrounds. Overall we found that OSS developers are interested in usability, but in practice it is not top priority, and OSS projects rarely employs systematic usability evaluation. Most of the efforts are based on common sense. Most developers have a very limited understanding of usability, and there is a lack of resources and evaluation methods fitting into the OSS paradigm. 1.
Major HCI Challenges for Open Source Software Adoption and Development
"... Abstract. The aim of the paper is to identify and discuss major challenges for OSS from an HCI perspective, so as to aid the adoption and development processes for end-users, developers and organizations. The paper focuses on four important HCI concerns: product usability, support for user and devel ..."
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Cited by 5 (0 self)
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Abstract. The aim of the paper is to identify and discuss major challenges for OSS from an HCI perspective, so as to aid the adoption and development processes for end-users, developers and organizations. The paper focuses on four important HCI concerns: product usability, support for user and development communities, accessibility and software usability and proposes areas for further research on the basis of related work and own experiences. 1.
in Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction
- Proceedings of the IFIP TC 2/WG 2.7 Working Conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North
, 1989
"... get involved with open source software through the OpenUsability project ..."
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Cited by 3 (0 self)
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get involved with open source software through the OpenUsability project
Security by decentralized certification of automatic-updates for open source software controlled by volunteers
- in Workshop on Decentralized Coordination
, 2013
"... Currently many users trust binaries downloaded from repositories such as sourceforge.net. As with any system connected to the Internet, such repositories can be subject to attacks tampering with the distributed binaries (inserting viruses, changing behavior). We propose a mechanism to reduce the lev ..."
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Cited by 1 (1 self)
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Currently many users trust binaries downloaded from repositories such as sourceforge.net. As with any system connected to the Internet, such repositories can be subject to attacks tampering with the distributed binaries (inserting viruses, changing behavior). We propose a mechanism to reduce the level of trust that users are required to have into repositories for open source software that is maintained by volunteers. In fact, with the proposed method, it is sufficient for the user to trust that his flexibly specified constellation of independent testers are safe to each given attack, even as all may be subject to different attacks. The interesting configuration when any majority t out of n testers of the given user’s choice have to be believed safe, is just a special case. A new integrated framework of open source development, testing, distribution and updating is defined, implemented and made available. Atester is a person that builds and tests an existing source code revision from a repository, and then distributes a signed binary release of it, tagged with a Quality of Test (QoT) and a Result of Test (RoT). An ontology for the QoT and RoT is defined and managed by the developers of the source code, and is fixed at each given revision. The final management of the mirrors distributing binaries tested by several testers is done by the mirror maintainers, who may or may not be from among the trusted testers. Some testers can be defined as reference (a new release is not automatically accepted without their signature and minimum RoT).
Extreme Discount Usability Engineering
"... This paper explores the circumstances under which extremely discounted usability engineering techniques produce results that are worthwhile to researchers and practitioners. We present a method for usability analysis where an entire evaluation can be conducted in only thirty minutes, an amount of ti ..."
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This paper explores the circumstances under which extremely discounted usability engineering techniques produce results that are worthwhile to researchers and practitioners. We present a method for usability analysis where an entire evaluation can be conducted in only thirty minutes, an amount of time we suggest as perhaps the smallest possible unit of analysis (or quantum) for complete usability evaluations. Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of thirty-six separate trials of this method, we assess the value of discount usability engineering at extremes of time and tests, and present our observations about the nature of user testing when pushed to extreme limits, a phenomenon we call the “Quantum Usability Effect.”
