BoF Sessions

During the four-day coding marathon there is the opportunity to hold BoF (Birds of a Feather) sessions, informal meetings or any other discussions.

This year the BoFs will be organised using unconference methods. The hope is that this will enable a more fluid and usefull experience. The BoFs will run in 3 rooms:

• Room 1 (A113): 67 seats, Data projector, Blackboard
• Room 2 (A117): 67 seats, Data projector, Blackboard
• Room 3 (A118): 50 chairs at 25 tables, 5 power sockets, Data projector, Blackboard

The rooms will be available 0900 - 2200, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday with Thursday being restricted to 0900 - 1100 for the daytrip. Room 3 will not be available on wednesday as it will be in use for Sun tutorials in the morning and Usability workshops in the afternoon.

In the morning on each of the days a board will be in A116 to allow you to book slots for that day. Slots are 1 hour long. The person booking the slot is responsible for organising and running the session (possibly with the help of others).

Watch the list of planned BoF sessions.

Sun Tutorials

The Sun tutorials will take place on Wednesday in Room 3 (A118).

Wednesday, 13 August 2008
Time	Topic	Speaker
9:00 - 10:00	Solaris: the platform	Gerard van den Berg
10:00 - 11:00	DTrace	Paul van den Bogaard
11:00 - 12:00	Studio 12	Roman V. Shaposhnik

If you have questions about Studio 12 you can ask the guru Romain V. Shaposhnik and even schedule a slot in the UnConference if required.

Presentations

Solaris: the platform

What is Solaris? Where does it come from? Why is it (still) an interesting platform to target? And why does ZFS rock so hard?

DTrace

Debugging and profiling an entire system under load at low cost.

Studio 12

Standard C++ is easier than you think.

HCI Day

The HCI workshop will take place on Wednesday afternoon in Room 3 (A118). These sessions cover all types of HCI topics as well as an interactive workshop at the end of the day.

Wednesday, 13 August 2008
Topic	Speaker
Welcome to KDE HCI Day	Celeste Lyn Paul and Ellen Reitmayr
Design Research Methods	Celeste Lyn Paul
User Groups and Personas	Ellen Reitmayr
HCI Concepts of the Plasma Desktop	Aaron Seigo
KDE4 Human Interface Guidelines	KDE Usability Project Members and Season of Usability Interns
KDE4 Open UI Workshop	KDE Usability Project Members

Presentations

Welcome to KDE HCI Day

A welcome to KDE HCI Day and review of the day’s activities.

Design Research Methods

Usability is not just about testing. There are all types of research methods designers use to create usable interfaces, some that include participation by users and others that do not. In this session, we will review the different type of research activities and how the results feed back in to design and development. There will also be an opportunity to ask questions to find out which research activities are right for your project.

User Groups and Personas

Lack of user research is one of the primary reasons usability in open source software is so hard to achieve. Learn about the importance of defining user groups and creating personas and how it can improve your project’s usability by helping developers understand their users. After a short introduction on user groups and personas, this session will be a hands-on activity where developers can ask questions specific to their projects and users and get help creating user groups and personas for use in their project’s KDE User Research Profile.

HCI Concepts of the Plasma Desktop

This session will talk about current HCI issues and future goals of the Plasma Desktop, including discussion on interaction concepts such as zooming user interfaces (ZUIs), passive configuration, and direct manipulation, as well Plasma and its use across the device spectrum.

KDE4 Human Interface Guidelines

During the past summer, 2 Season of Usability interns helped us create patterns and guidelines for the KDE4 Human Interface Guidelines. In this session we will review notable changes between KDE3 and KDE4, review new guidelines and patterns, and discuss samples of HIG violations and their fixes. A question and answer session will follow for developers to ask specific questions about the guidelines and how they might apply to UI problems they are working on. More involved questions or design problems may be discussed during the KDE4 Open UI Workshop.

KDE4 Open UI Workshop

This is an open discussion period for KDE4 HIG- and UI-related issues. Developers should come prepared with questions and sample screenshots (website links or USB key) to discuss and get assistance. Benefit from other developers’ questions and participate in the discussion.