1.1 About the author

This guidebook is a result of being heavily involved with both free software and usability. Most of the learnings come from working on two free & open source software projects.

1. Nextcloud (formerly ownCloud), a personal web platform for data and applications, roughly similar to Dropbox, Google Apps and iCloud. I work on user experience in its many facets: interface design, frontend coding, user research and community.
2. Diaspora, a decentralized social network roughly similar to Facebook and Twitter. It is a bigger project already, there I build a workflow for user experience design & testing and establish a user experience team.

In Fall–Winter 2010 I interned at relevantive in Berlin and did user tests in the lab, in the car and by foot. I also got involved with OpenUsability. I did interaction design for Cardapio, a menu and launcher similar to the Windows start menu and Mac OS Spotlight. In Summer 2009, I worked together with Canonical’s Charline Poirier on usability testing for Shotwell before it became Ubuntu’s default photo application. The results are published on my blog.