Jan:
Within the last weeks, me and Jan-Christoph Borchardt student joined the list because we are both interested in usability and want to push open source further.
That's great!
Maybe there is a strong interest by other young and motivated students at universities who would like improve the gnome user experience. What do you think about setting up a possibility for universities and students to get in contact with gnome? If you like the idea - what do you think are decent ways to do that?
The GNOME community is always interested in working with volunteers and academia, and there are many on-going usability tasks where help is needed. To get started, I would recommend participating on this mailing list for some time and joining in discussions. From time to time, people ask the GNOME Usability team for help in various areas. Stepping in to help when such requests are made is a great way to start the process of getting involved. Also the GNOME Usability team Wiki contains information about things that are currently being worked on, and would be a good resource to familiarize yourself with. There is plenty of work-in-progress highlighted on the Wiki which would benefit from some further attention. http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject If you have any particular interests, then it would be helpful if you could explain in more detail how you would like to get involved. Do you have an interest in doing usability studies, research (such as card sorting), providing critiques of the usability of new modules proposed for GNOME 2.30, or what? There may be people on the GNOME Usability team who might be able to act as a mentor for you, but this would be easier to arrange if it is more clear what specific things you have the interest and time to work on. When internships become available, it is most common for them to be given to people who have a good track record of doing productive volunteer work, so being active as a volunteer is the best way to work towards finding further opportunities to work more closely on the project. Brian _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list Usability@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
