Moderator: Görkem Çetin

15:00 Opening speech, Kaan Erkan

15:10 Usability in F/OSS software from the point of K12 students, by Francesca Campora

15:50 Usability with Free Software in education: the Fuss Project experience, by Christopher Gabriel

16:20 How do open source developers and HCI experts work? Issues and discussion, by Görkem Çetin

16:50 Coffee break

17:10 Defining F/OSS usability in real life: Digital interactive television, by Lorenzo Pallara

17:40 How do F/OSS content management systems perform when it comes to usability and user experience?, by Andrea Resmini

18:20 Break

18:30 Panel discussion (all speakers)

19:10 Closing

20:00 Dinner at Le Stanze Restaurant

Short introduction for the presentations

Defining F/OSS usability in real life: Digital interactive television, by Lorenzo Pallara

I would like to introduce the usability issues we faced developing our open source solutions for digital television here at Cineca.We developed open source applications and application's engines for interactive television inviting others italian developers to join the community and give a feedback on how the users are behaving with different user interfaced models in the digital television channels available on Italy from 2004.

In this seminar, we'll present some qualitative results based on real services on air in Italy and about one of our main projects "t-islessia", an interactive application designed by a team of psychologists to help kids with the learning disability of Dyslexia.

How do F/OSS content management systems perform when it comes to usability and user experience?, by Andrea Resmini

What do the New Zealand Government, the Teatro alla Scala, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a Swedish bank, Amazon and the National Geographic France have in common? As far as this presentation is concerned, the answer is rather simple: they are all business or public entities which publish their web sites using Free, Libre or Open Source Content Management Systems (FL/OSS CMS).

Web content management is now a mature field which is now responsible for a large share of the information we receive daily: and although not so ubiquitous in some top sectors, FL/OSS is a large part of this share. Nonetheless, usability issues are a relatively recent concern on the World Wide Web, CM itself is barely ten years old, and using a web site is an all-encompassing experience which may range from a flawless pleasant read to an actually rough and often useless ordeal.

How is the FL/OSS CMS posse faring when it comes to usability and user experience? Is this actually being even considered an issue? And if it is, to what extent and what goals? Can we deliver a good UX? By quickly examining ad-hoc critical tasks (searching, navigating, page browsing on the users' side; entering content, building navigation, standards compliance on the administrative side) we will try to show some of the current shortcomings and what they actually mean as far as concerns better or worse usability, findability and user experience.

Usability in F/OSS software from the point of K12 students, by Francesca Campora

Every time we need a software, we are Free to download it and share it.If the software is not in italian language we are Free to Open and translate it and every time we work with, writing articles and simple documentation, we can Open a Free way to other teachers.

That has been my teaching life since 1998.

By quickly examining the history of OSS in primary school from 1998 to nowadays we will try to show and consider some successful events and some critical points to find out which are the best possible strategies in order to improve the usage and the adoption of OSS in Italian primary schools.

How do open source developers and HCI experts work? Issues and discussion, by Görkem Çetin

F/OSS Usability is the poster child on many developer's vision. While it has attracted developers and usability experts' attention, there's little work done on this subject, especially focusing on the types of collaboration models between HCI experts and developers. In this talk, we are going to investigate how geographically distributed project stakeholders can
collaborate using the open source tools, and which points we should take into consideration in the process of making our product have a user centered design.

Usability with Free Software in education: the Fuss Project experience, by Christopher R. Gabriel

The FUSS Project has migrated the whole italian education system in the
northern-italy region of South Tyrol to free software in August 2005.
An year later, a new analysis about usability is in act, in order to
address all the issues discovered in the project's next phase