csclub.uwaterloo.ca — In a talk at the University of Waterloo, Professor Michael Terry discusses the use of data mining, in a customized version of the Gimp, in order to discover and analyse real-world usability data. He touches on encouraging users to participate, privacy concerns, as well as common user categories that the software is currently able to sift out.
Jul 10, 2007 View in Crawl 4
pantsdJul 11, 2007
I'm really interested to see how the gimp people are going about improving usability . I wish them the best of luck, they have got a long way to go :)
drealothJul 11, 2007
This seems to me to be an untapped benefit of the free software movement. I doubt that people trust even the ostensibly nicest corporations to allow themselves to be subjected to this, and yet here it changes from voluntarily being spied upon to actually helping out the community. That is not a criticism, I think that it's genuinely a good thing that that is the direction that free software is moving to. The more input that people are able to have, the more people can have, the faster and more successful free software will be. And with the openness of it, a trust is gained that could not be found in the proprietary software world. The future of free software lies in more than just programmers and the odd artist being able to affect change.