The Communicational Side of Open Source Communities

Communication is a fundamental value of software development teams, especially in Open Source(OP) communities, in fact, is a quite complex network of individuals having different roles and responsibilities, who can be looked upon as volunteers who spend their time creating and improving software. These people taking part in OS Software development use to share knowledge among themselves, exchange information and creative a collaborative environment. To coordinate and improve communication of these teams dis-located all over the world and use to work at different times and ways, it is necessary to predispose and utilize specific tools. This research study was born with the proposal to individuate and evaluate communication among members of OS communities analysing different development teams. The starting point is an academic software development project: Metodologie Agili Distribuite (Agile Distribuite Metodologies, MAD) project. This case study, performed at University of Cagliari, was made up of two well defined software development phases. The first one performed within an almost pure XP co-located environment, the second one involving a 20-programmers distributed team. The main goal of this experience was to show how a pure XP approach evolves while passing from a co-located to a distribute team

Evaluation of User Gestures in Multi-touch Interaction: a Case Study in Pair-programming

Natural User Interfaces are often described as familiar, evocative and intuitive, predictable, based on common skills. Though unquestionable in principle, such definitions don't provide the designer with effective means to design a natural interface or evaluate a design choice vs another. Two main issues in particular are open: (i) how do we evaluate a natural interface, is there a way to measure 'naturalness'; (ii) do natural user interfaces provide a concrete advantage in terms of efficiency, with respect to more traditional interface paradigms? In this paper we discuss and compare observations of user behavior in the task of pair programming, performed at a traditional desktop versus a multi-touch table. We show how the adoption of a multi-touch user interface fosters a significant, observable and measurable, increase of nonverbal communication in general and of gestures in particular, that in turn appears related to the overall performance of the users in the task of algorithm understanding and debugging

Playing by the rules: co-designing interactive installations with pupils

During the last couple of decades our perception of what constitutes a good learning environment has changed. Thanks to the use of technology, education is evolving from a passive model towards a more productive model, where students generate knowledge, teach each other, and collaborate on activities that make learning fun and interesting. In some previous works we have adopted this attitude: creating interactive installations thought for learning in an amusing way. Design-based research has demonstrated its potential as a methodology suitable to both research and design of technology-enhanced learning environments, a further step consists in co-design: students directly involved in designing with researchers. This paper provides some comments on the evaluation of the learning experience using two interactive installations promoting eco-friendly behaviours, and describe our experience in codesigning with pupils. We also report the ethnographic research performed underlining the weaknesses and the strengths, the difficulties and findings during the whole work

Polaris4os: a best practice for training and adoption of f/oss in sme

The methodical adoption of F/OSS in SMEs raises critical problems related to issues such as technology, organization, culture and business model choices. In this paper, we describe Polaris4OS, a successful experience of F/OSS adoption among CEOs, managers and developers of ICT companies. The lack of F/OSS culture has been identified as the most critical obstacle for the exploitation of the new opportunities offered by the F/OSS communities.89-9

Familiar context and motivations in sports among adulescents

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The challenge of collaborative telerehabilitation: conception and evaluation of a telehealth system enhancement for home-therapy follow-up

Telerehabilitation aims to solve problems like equitable access to the rehabilitation and cost reduction by providing rehabilitation services at a distance. The largest part of telerehabilitation systems implement a real-time one-to-one process involving patient and therapist. Even though they can be successfully exploited in conditions such as post-traumatic recovery, in complex scenarios, this simple model should be replaced by a more structured collaborative one envisioning a multidisciplinary team. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a patient-centric collaborative telerehabilitation framework aimed at supporting a multidisciplinary team in the follow-up of domiciliary patients. The proposed framework follows the experience of a clinical trial that exploited a novel telerehabilitation device not conceived to support collaborative scenarios. Compared with the original system, the proposed extension allows the hierarchical division of the responsibility within the medical team, promoting a collaborative management of the rehabilitation. Proactive and decisional behaviors, as well as consulting practices on shared data within the medical team, are fostered by the system. Semi-structured interviews have been administered to a panel of experts to evaluate the proposed approach. The collected feedback can be exploited to finely tune the system in view of a new clinical trial including new functionalities