About

Season of Usability is a series of sponsored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design to get involved with Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) projects.

Inspired by Google's Summer of Code™, OpenUsability offers sponsored student projects. Other than the Google projects that address developers, they aim at students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design. Students experience the interdisciplinary and collaborative development of user interface solutions in international software projects while getting into OSS development.

The idea of the student projects is to establish a close collaboration between the student, a key developer from the software project (technical mentor) and a usability mentor. Students learn how to develop design solutions in agreement with the whole team to learn how to obtain solution-oriented results. During a cooperation that spans several months, students closely work together with experienced professionals and get insights in to their way of work. Learn more about successes from our first Season of Usability in 2007 in our Success Stories.

In 2008, we offer 10 new student projects from various fields of application. We want to thank our leading sponsors Google Inc., Open Society Institute and Trolltech ASA who make the Season of Usability 2008 possible.