The next Drupalcon, the twice-yearly gathering of the content management platform Drupal, will take place in Boston from March 3, 2008 to March 6, 2008.

A wide variety of usability issues will be discussed in the Design and User Experience Track. Major goals of the track are to attract more designers and improve Drupal's visual design.

Session propsals are still open and comprise graphic design, theming, usability and interaction design, site planning and information architecture. Some of them are organised by our Season of Usability student, Bevan Rudge.

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). During a 3 to 6 month collaboration, students work together with an experienced usability mentor and key developers of the project to improve the user experience of a FLOSS application. The next Season of Usability with 8 student projects will start in Spring 2008.

FLOSS Projects who would like to benefit from a usability student are encouraged to fill in our Call for Projects questionnaire:

>> Season of Usability 2008 - Call for Projects Questionnaire (available till February 20th)

For further details, please see the Call for Projects page on the Season of Usability website.

In the scope of our Season of Usability programme, another student project has just been kicked off: Bevan Rudge, a student of computer science at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, is going to support the content management platform Drupal usability-wise. The major focus of this student project will be user interface improvements for the Drupal core, for item management and local navigation, as well as writing a usability guide for developers.

We want to thank CivicActions who co-sponsor this student project.

Read the whole story on the Season of Usability website !