How Do You Get Developers to Care for the Itches of Others? Introducing Usability to an Open Source Community

The focus of this paper is the study of distribution of knowledge about actual users and actual use to a distributed open source software organization. While there is an increasing use of open source systems in various types of organizations, the assumption is that the types of users and work situations are differentiated. These issues have not been sufficiently explored from within the open source development community, and knowledge about users and use situation need to be investigated and the knowledge disseminated to the development community.
Various attempts to introduce end-user issues are presented. Lastly, in an attempt to understand the preconditions for an understanding of users within an open source development environment, a discussion between members of a usabilityoriented fraction within the organization is analyzed. In this analysis, understanding HCI and end-users as boundary objects for the organization discloses how an insufficient coordination and translation of these, for HCI, key terms leads to a flawed organizational implementation of usercentered approaches.