Fall 2009 Unconference Activity Ideas

The following are some ideas for activities we might want to schedule when we arrive. Please feel free to add your own or comment on the ones that are already listed. If you're thinking you're interested in participating in particular topics or areas, be sure to sign up on the participants page.

Activity	Description
Lightning Talks	Many presenters giving very short talks. Maybe 10m talk + 5m Q&A and speaker switching - that would fit 6 talks in 90 minutes. Plenary works well so that everyone connects with some shared topics for discussion, shouldn't be too painful for people uninterested in a particular talk because they are short.
Code Reviews
uPortal Steering Committee Suggestions	What people want out of testing What we want in a user manual Solicit content for our Fall Webinar Series (i.e., portal tours, portlet show-and-tell, etc.) What people want in a possible portlet bundle What would be a good format for a uPortal road map, especially our strategic direction ERP integration, especially Banner portlets and how we should coordinate
Collaborative Development	Programmers get together to implement the need for a particular feature for CAS, a portlet, uPortal, etc.
Q&A	Ask the experts...
Screencast Recording	Help JA-SIG and uPortal gather better marketing materials! Developers with interesting open source software, compelling usages of the software, head over to a kiosk where someone versed in effective screenshot and screencast capture helps the participant to navigate to their cool software on the web and take some screenshots and screencasts that can then be input to an ever more compelling JA-SIG web presence.
Meeting & Planning	Board, Infrastructure Team, uPortal Steering Committe, uPortal stakeholders, 2010 Spring Conference Planning
Talking/Questions	Conversations topics attendees are interested in and who they would like to have involved.
Clinics	Open sourcing, Portlets, Spring Framework, uPortal
Fall 2009 Unconference Infrastructure and Services Team Meeting	A team meeting to focus in on our current and future efforts.
Developers Meeting at Urbana Champaign - 2009.10	Post UnConference developers meeting
User Experience Walkthroughs	Do a combination heuristic evaluation/cognitive walkthrough of your application, portlet, etc. to identify usability problems and suggest solutions (with Interaction Designer assistance)
Hallway User Testing	Get feedback on the usability of your portlet, application, etc. by defining quick testing scenarios & testing on other participants (with Interaction Designer assistance)
Learn how to create a UI Design Pattern	Create a UI design pattern relevant to your application to contribute to the Open Source Design Pattern Library (with Interaction Designer assistance)