Zen and the art of Free Software: know your user, know yourself

Many free software projects don't seem to have a direction, and seem to proceed randomly in the dark. In order to better direct your project, you have to know your users, and you have to know the most important one among them: yourself. The paper introduces some cheap, stupid and tremendously useful user-centered design techniques that can be used in the free software world. In Free Software there's a strange Heisenberg-like principle, in which you're both part of the developer and part of the user community. Better insight of your users, can turn out to be better insight of yourself. You goals may be the same as your user's, and often they may be different. Why would we want to develop something that isn't addressing our goals? Why would we want to offer users something that isn't addressing theirs? Confusing goals bring to frustration; uderstanding them this brings to peace, harmony, and Total World Domination!

I graduated in Computer Science at the University of Bologna in March, 2004, I'm a free software developer and a Debian developer. I work in Debian and Debian Non-Profit, with a special interest on HCI and on social aspects of software, and take part both in local projects and in international cooperation initiatives. I'm the author of Debian Package Tags, Guessnet and other smaller software. I work locally with software and society with the Bologna Free Software Forum group (www.bfsf.it). I work on International Cooperation and Digital Divide with the Prodigi group (www.pro-digi.org).