[kidsUI] About me

[Doug Loss <dloss@suscom.net>]

As I promised (and Sanjay delivered for himself), here's my background
and reason for being on this list.

I manage the education section of SEUL, Simple End User Linux.  I've
been using Linux for 4-5 years as my home system.  I have a son who is
currently 8 years old.  I didn't want any Microsoft software on any of
the systems I have at home, but I wanted Stefan to be able to use the
system for education and for entertainment.  Because of that (and the
fact that there was very little software for Linux that was useful for
children) I helped start the SEUL/edu section, and later joined the
kidsgames mailing list.  SEUL/edu is primarily concerned with
scholastic uses of Linux.

I'm interested in HCI (human-computer interfaces) and children because
I think we're in a unique position with the rise of the open source
community.  Since there isn't and hopefully won't ever be one uniform
user interface for Linux and the like, we can pick from among many
choices the ones that we prefer.  For this reason there's much less
pressure to not design variant interfaces for specific purposes.  One
of those purposes ought to be to make Linux more friendly to children.

I'd like to see this mailing list discuss the needs of children in a
computer interface, the ways children approach computers and how they
differ from the ways adults do, and methods to address these needs. 
Rather than see the members of this list design a window manager,
desktop environment, or application software as a new start, I'd like
to see us come up with a fairly comprehensive set of guidelines that
can be used by anyone working on any of the above types of projects to
make kid-oriented versions, themes, or variants of their work.  So we
might see GNOMEKids, KidsDE, KidsWindowmaker, etc., coming from our
design recommendations but not necessarily being all our own code.

To do this I think we need some more input from other people on this
list than Sanjay, Ken, and me.  Could the rest of you introduce
yourselves as Sanjay and I did? Let's see where we can take this!

-- 
Doug Loss            There's no trick to being a humorist
dloss@suscom.net     when you have the whole government
(570) 326-3987       working for you.
                        Will Rogers