Hello, after the entusiasm gathered at the Linux Conference Australia 2003, I'm honored to announce the birth of a new Debian effort. The Debian Usability Research * Where it is Web site: http://deb-usability.alioth.debian.org Mailing list: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/deb-usability-list * What it is The Debian Usability Research is a volunteer research effort focused on identifying and addressing Debian-specific usability issues. * What it is not The Debian Usability Research does not intend to address general human computer interaction, nor any other usability issue that is not specific to Debian, like Gnome, KDE or OpenOffice usability problems. For that purpose, other infrastructure and communities have already been available for a long time. * Brief history At the Linux Conference Australia 2003 there was a BOF about debian usability issues. At the end of the BOF we gathered e-mail addresses and decided to continue working on these issues once we got back home. The continuation of that BOF is what is now called "Debian Usability Research". The initial main areas of interest were: - status of package metadata: what is ok, what is still missing, how could it be added; - package searching and browsing techniques, to cope with the large and increasing number of packages; - how "debian flavours" (debian package subsets targeted at specific needs) could help produce distributions that better address the needs of different communities and how they could be more easily created; - how to handle usability bug reports. Recently, there have been many interesting discussions in debian-devel on topics like these, and it seems that there is a strong and growing interest in them. I especially welcome all the people who followed those threads to join and participate to the list: the Debian Usability Research intends to be the place where this kind of issues can be seriously studied and taken care of. Debian is steadily growing, and the growth introduces new and interesting usability problems. I hope you will decide to join in, and share the fun. Yours truly, Enrico P.S.: I would really like to thank the staff of www.bononia.it for kindly volunteering to host the project. We had already started setting up things there, but Alioth came in and it was the right place to be. -- GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
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