fordes

Recently, I browsed itch.io’s tools section, a list of many tools, largely for game creation or general computer-supported creativity: Musik, zines, map generators, and batch tools. They remind me of late 90s and early 2000s free- and shareware: Small, useful tools created often by single programmers, sometimes a …

“If only they would know what we know!…”

Developers should learn how to design user interfaces and everyone should learn how to code: The cry for a better education of others in ones own field is frequent: If they only knew what we know, the world would be better and …

There is an interesting type of feedback, which you can often find when people tell on the web that they are disappointed in a product they are invested in.

“I waited 10 years for this release and I had high hopes. But after trying it, I was shocked by the …

I always wondered why open source projects love community-driven logo competitions (almost all logos of Wikimedia projects seem to have been created this way). What happens is this: A person or a group makes the case the the project needs a logo or needs an improved logo. If they are …

Wikipedia can be edited by everyone. But after the honeymoon phase until 2006, Wikipedia saw had a slow decline of people joining and staying. Why is it so hard to retain editors?

One way to explain the problem of retention could be the idea of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP)^{1 …}

At the WikidataCon 2017 I organized a participatory design workshop on documenting and sharing Wikidata editing workflows. Here, I describe what we did. It should be sufficient information to organize such a workshop yourself. I used similar methods before, but this particular way is new, so if you try it …