optimal web design Designing a website that takes into account the human element requires both an understanding of our nature as well as our physiological limitations. Usable websites incorporate human tendencies and limitation into its overall design. The questions below are meant to address some of the more important human factors concerns in the design [...]

EMTEL European Media, Technology and Everyday Life All sorts of fun(?) papers using the EMTEL research. EMTEL is a research and training network of European social scientists investigating the social dimensions of the Information Society in Europe. It includes 7 partners in 6 different countries (Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Norway, the UK). It involves [...]

Drawing clear lines between information systems In many organisations, the intranet competes with e-mail, file shares, the document management system and records management. Information is scattered between these systems, making it difficult for users to know where to look. What is needed is a clear policy about when these information systems should be used, and [...]

WaSP : Learn : Reference: Web Standards for Business This article highlights the benefits of using Web standards for business sites (Internet, intranet and extranet sites). It is aimed at stakeholders from the marketing, communication and IT departments.

Usability and open-source software development Proceedings of the Symposium on Computer Human Interaction, (eds.) Kemp, E., Phillips, C., Kinshuk & Haynes, J., 6 July 2001, Palmerston North, New Zealand. ACM SIGCHI New Zealand. 49-54. ISBN: 0-473-07559-8. Open-source is becoming an increasingly popular software development method. This paper reports a usability study of the open-source Greenstone [...]

The Internet and the right to communicate The Internet and the right to communicate by William J. McIver, Jr., William F. Birdsall, and Merrilee Rasmussen First Monday, volume 8, number 12 (December 2003), URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/mciver/index.html The “Right to Communicate” is an interesting balance to the controversy over information ownership.

The Linux managing model The Linux managing model by Federico Iannacci First Monday, volume 8, number 12 (December 2003), URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/iannacci/index.html The pros and cons of open-source versus commercial or proprietary development have been argued as part of the open vs. closed debate but this article actually examines the process of development in the Linux [...]

Licence fees and GDP per capita Licence fees and GDP per capita: The case for open source in developing countries by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh First Monday, volume 8, number 12 (December 2003), URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/ghosh/index.html this note argues that the controversy over total costs of ownership (TCO) of free vs. proprietary software is not applicable to [...]

On the Web, Research Work Proves Ephemeral (washingtonpost.com) Essentially, web URLs are becoming often used as references in scholarly works. However, the rate at which these resources as a whole move around, change and disappear, defeats the purpose of references in the first place. At first it seems like an obvious observation but when you [...]

How to Misunderstand Open Source Software Development A very well-written and credible essay on open-source software from a professional developer.