Tx to a slashdot article about KDE and OpenUsability, I am really confused, perhaps sad. It was the discussion afterwards. I did not know that the world is devided into Gnome and KDE. But if I read (some of) the comments, I get the impression. True, the idea for the OpenUsability project came out of discussions during Nove Hrady two years ago, and many KDE projects do like it and use it, and the OU project learned a lot about potential workflows and how to ease cooperation from it. But, and let me quote: "Now getting usability expert on board to solve these issues sure is the right way and if KDE 3.4 is anything to judge from, there are great things to come for KDE." Hello? Again, anyone who produces free software can and should make use of OpenUsability.

The FLOSS-Usability project is a strong initiative to bring developers and usability folks together. Their first "Sprint" took place in February in San Francisco and it was a amazing workshop (image). Eugene Eric Kim then brought up the idea of usability mentoring or caretakers who support the projects if the developers want it. This "matchmaking" was and is one of the basic ideas of OpenUsability, so that we decided to put our efforts together. That's in fact georgious news, because the Floss-Usability initiators have so much speed and they are very excellent in getting people together and keeping things rolling.

While usability guys normally can never sleep (because there is always something to complain about, if only the dream), they at least can laugh sometimes.