As announced earlier this year, we are in the process of getting the Tine 2.0s development process being certified according to ISO 13407.
For this, we need to specify and document the development process from the users point of view. This is a bit challenging, as we found no other open source project to learn from, already being certified.
In closed source software projects, there is no community and as such no community is being described in the development process. However, in a open source project, the community plays a crucial role, and this must be reflected in any process documentation!
But what is the part of the community when talking about usability and a user centric development process?
Normally community members have quite a deep understanding of the software and moreover are (highly) technically affine people. Considering this, they are not suited as test persons when it comes to learn-ability of the software.
But when it comes to productivity the community suites just perfect. This are the people using Tine 2.0 on a daily bases. Here we can get highly qualified feedback how Tine is enhancing and decreasing their productivity. This kind of feedback is extremely helpful for usability experts.
Also for the conceptual phase of new features, the technically educated community is a major advantage of open source projects. Collecting the brilliant ideas of the admins an superusers out there is a perfect source for architectureing new concepts.
An other great way the community can help are automated online tests.  Björn and his team is working on an icon matching tool and other simple tests for normal users (including our john smith persona). Automated tests need a large number of test persons to have expressing results. Again this fits the community approach.
So far our current ideas, how to include community in the user centric development process. If you have more ideas, please let us know!
