Linknote — — 138 words

Society — Technology

The privilege of free time in Open Source — Dries Buytaert

Caption: "Free time to contribute is a privilege."

Dries Buytaert makes a very good point here. Time is the scarcest resource we have. This is making open source a closed shop.

Today, I’ve come to understand that inequality makes it difficult for underrepresented groups to have the “free time” it takes to contribute to Open Source.

He suggests some ways open source communities could take action on this.

Overall, being kinder, more patient and more supportive to others could go a long way in welcoming more people to Open Source.

The culture of coding seems nasty generally. I’m not sure if it’s specifically a problem with open source as opposed to developers generally.

But I always found it odd how unwelcoming, patronising and generally unhelpful people in open source communities (such as WordPress support forums) can sometimes be. Sometimes it doesn’t seem very open at all.

Linknote — — 186 words

Technology — User experience — User research

Work:

Improving student experiences in Learn: usability testing showcase and workshop — Informatics Learning Technology Service

Prioritised usability issues

My colleague Alex Burford from the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics has written this great blog post about some usability testing we have conducted in support of the Learn Foundations project.

> I thoroughly enjoyed working with [Duncan Stephen](https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/duncan-stephen) on this mini project. The feedback was informative, encouraging, and a call to action. I’m looking forward to embedding similar practice across the School for alternative platforms for content delivery.

[You can read my own reflections on this work at the Website and Communications team blog](https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/come-to-the-next-learn-usability-testing-showcase-on-29-march/).

Each month we are working with a different school to conduct usability testing in Learn, the virtual learning environment, to inform improvements to the Learn service.

This is just one strand of a huge amount of user research I’ve been carrying out for the [Learn Foundations](https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/tag/learn-foundations/) project. It’s been a fascinating and very enjoyable project to work on. I’ve been pretty lax at writing about it yet — but I’ll be posting much more about it soon.

Linknote — — 72 words

Human-centred approaches — Society — Technology

People won’t stop staring at their phones, so a Dutch town put traffic lights on the ground — Neha Thirani Bagri — Quartz

Experimental Dutch traffic crossing

An interesting experiment to place pedestrian crossing signals on the ground, “where everyone is already looking”. The Netherlands seems to be the place for experimental road safety design (see also: the squareabout).

This has got to be an improvement on the modern fad of placing pedestrian crossing signals at chest height to the side, where they simply get blocked by other people, rather than across the road where everyone can see it.

Photo — — 109 words

Service design

Work:

People affinity mapping

I had a fabulous day at the [Service Design Academy](http://sda.ac.uk/) bootcamp yesterday.

It’s part of the [PDA in Service Design](http://sda.ac.uk/index.php/our-courses/service-design-award/). I never thought I’d be a student again. But I’m loving the opportunity to get stuck in and get talking to like-minded peers from other organisations.

It’s great to be back in Dundee again too! Looking forward to seeing what day two has in store.

Generating ideas

Generating ideas

Distilling our ideas

Distilling our ideas

View of V&A Dundee

The view from my hotel window