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Designing for discovery: opening the hood for open-source end user tinkering

Published: 04 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

According to the Free Software Movement, the user ought to have "the freedoms to make changes, and to publish improved versions" and "to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs". The Open Source Initiative expects users to access source code, explaining that "you can't evolve programs without modifying them. Since our purpose is to make evolution easy, we require that modification be made easy". These philosophies can shape a unique perspective on software usability that has not been addressed thoroughly in the open-source domain. That is: how to design user-interfaces and tools that facilitate access to source code and encourage the behaviors envisioned above, namely, to improve the code, to personalize it, to learn from it, and to share it. And, as the Open Source Initiative recommends, to make this easy. In addition to presenting this research perspective, we suggest some fruitful approaches to answering these questions and our current and future steps.

References

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Bach, P. M., Kirschner, B., and Carroll, J. M. Usability and free/libre/open source software SIG: HCI expertise and design rationale. Ext. Abstracts CHI 2007, ACM Press (2007), 2097--2100.
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Fitzgerald, B. and Ågerfalk, P.J. The Mysteries of Open Source Software: Black and White and Red All Over? HICSS (2005).
[3]
Ko, A. J. and Myers, B. A. Designing the whyline: a debugging interface for asking questions about program behavior. Proc. CHI 2004, ACM Press (2004), 151--158.
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Mockus, A., Fielding, R.T., and Herbsleb, J.D. A case study of open source software development: the Apache server. ICSE (2000), 263--272.
[5]
Myers, B. A., Ko, A. J., and Burnett, M. M. Invited research overview: end--user programming. In Ext. Abstracts CHI 2006, ACM Press (2006), 75--80.
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Nichols, D.M. and Twidale, M. The Usability of Open Source Software. First Monday 8,1 (2003).
[7]
The Free Software Definition -- GNU Project -- Free Software Foundation (FSF). http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.
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The Open Source Definition (Annotated) | Open Source Initiative. http://opensource.org/docs/definition.php.

Cited By

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  • (2011)A Review of Tool Support for User-Related Communication in FLOSS DevelopmentOpen Source Systems: Grounding Research10.1007/978-3-642-24418-6_7(90-105)Online publication date: 2011

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '09: CHI '09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2009
2470 pages
ISBN:9781605582474
DOI:10.1145/1520340
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 April 2009

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Author Tags

  1. design rationale
  2. end-user programming
  3. open source software
  4. usability
  5. user-centered design

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  • Extended-abstract

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CHI '09
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CHI EA '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 385 of 1,130 submissions, 34%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2011)A Review of Tool Support for User-Related Communication in FLOSS DevelopmentOpen Source Systems: Grounding Research10.1007/978-3-642-24418-6_7(90-105)Online publication date: 2011

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