It looks like MinneBar will have 15 sessions throughout the day (3 concurrent sessions in 5 time slots). Many will already have topics but we will leave room for signing up for topics during the event.

What do you want to talk about? Suggest session ideas below. Sessions will be discussions of 40 minutes in length and can cover just about any topic you can dream up. Expect some topics to be introduced and added the day of the even as well as everyone gets a feel for the crowd and wht they would like to talk about.

Tentative Session Schedule

Session Topics

10:00 - 10:40

Area A: Programmer and Designer Roles

Jacob Hookom

How CSS, server-side languages, and semantic markup can help define programmer and designer relationships with agile development

Area B: Real-world Security practices

J Cruit

Topic surrounds security practices.

Area C: Building Synthetic Worlds

Mark McCahill and Tim Bray

Immersive multi-user enviroments are used for entertainment, virtual meeting places, teaching, and learning, We discuss two approachs to building massively multiuser synthetic worlds: an open source P2P toolkit called Croquet and proprietary server-centric model called Second Life. U of MN is a core ed partner on Croquet project and Mark McCahill is one of the Croquet architects. Tim Bray blogs about Second Life.

11:00 - 11:40

Area A: Open Systems Licenses and Legislation

John Nesbitt & AaronFulkerson

A discussion of OSS/Open Standards Legislation and Policy in MN as well as some discussion centering on understanding the variety of available open source licenses

Area B: Agile Design

Ben Edwards

The agile method has been proven effective in the world of software development yet the various design disciplines (information, interaction, visual, etc.) seem to have fallen behind on this. Discuss how agile themes and methods can be incorporated into the workflows of designers regardless whether or not they are working with an agile development team.

2:00 - 2:40

Area A: Ajax

Nate Schutta

By now you've been exposed to the hype that is Ajax. You've been awed by Google Maps, you've tried Ta-da List, heck, maybe you even know what AJAX the acronym means. In the past we had to choose between difficult to deploy thick clients or feature bare thin clients but today we have a new choice: We can give our users the best of both worlds thanks to Ajax techniques. In this presentation, we'll cut through the hype and help you see where Ajax makes sense in your applications. We'll give you a brief overview of what Ajax is and recommendations for its usage, followed up by tips on how to take some of the pain out of JavaScript. Leading companies are introducing your customers to the possibilities of a richer web experience and after this talk; you'll be on your way to meeting their new expectations.

Area B: On being an independent Open Source Software developer

Ethan Galstad.

I'll talk about how I'm able to remain self-employed while developing an Open Source software project (Nagios) that is available free of charge. This is accomplished by using some "non-standard" OSS business models that don't get press attention. I'll talk about how Nagios got started, how the new business model came about, and where the model (and Nagios) is going in the future.

Area C: Real World CSS Design

Mark Powell

Bring your del.icio.us, Furl, Blinklist bookmarks, Web Developer toolbar and let's open up the hood. Show off innovative sites you've built or found and let everyone see how it works and why it's awesome. Other areas for discussion may include semantic mark-up and ECMA script that allows content to be separate from design separate from interaction.

3:00 - 3:40

Area A: Open Source tools for Businesses

Steve Hanson, Ethan Galstad & AaronFulkerson

Some topics that are sure to come up are using open source tools such as blogs, wikis and other CMS solutions in information management. Additional discussion could be around open source monitoring tools such as Nagios as well as specific soluton for small business and non-profit organizations. (Steve Hanson) Issues I would particularly like to discuss include:

• Open Source Web Content Management
• Podcasting
• RSS for nonprofit groups

~ AaronFulkerson: After talking (briefly) with Steve and Ethan I think this needs to be broken up into two disparate sessions. 1). IntErnet focused 2). IntrAnet focused. I'm more interested in the latter. Thoughts?

Area B: Disintermediation

Charles Gimon

Disintermediation: who loses their job in an interconnected world? This will be more about economies of knowledge and expertise, rather than about physical supply chains. When information is searchable and obtainable quickly from anywhere, what happens to occupations that are based on providing information? Are those occupations based on delivering information, or on managing artificial scarcity of information? How does this affect the role of experts in a field? Is the public willing to be told what is trustable information, or will they insist on deciding for themselves?

Area C: crum Experience Report

James Walsh as moderator

Join a discussion about how Scrum is working in your organization. Share your experience moving to Scrum and what successes and difficulties you have day-to-day. Learn how to be a better Scrum Master, Product Owner, or Dev Team member from other practitioners in your community.

5:00 - 5:40

Area A: Microformats

AaronFulkerson

Microformats are community established rules/standards for adding application specific semantics to XHTML. It's very simple stuff and is something that will become increasingly more useful in the next year+. In short, we're talking about simple and effective standards for semantic webbing. Pretty cool really. For an example of what I'm talking about view my hcard.

For more info see Microformats.org

Area B: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Ward Tongen is the discussion leader, YOU are the speaker.

Search engines are always changing and so should your strategies for keeping up with them. Possible subtopics:

• What techniques are illicit and what are best industry practices?
• What are the search engine spiders up to these days and how does it affect our web servers?
• Have you been banned or penalized by a search engine?

IDEA: Since we will have Internet access, participants may request a group critique of their website.

Teams aren't like boy bands - there's no formula that you can follow to guarantee a high performing team (though even if there was, many companies would probably ignore it anyway.) The best you can do (provided you are in a position to influence any of this) is provide fertile ground for teams to sprout. In many ways, its like being a farmer - all you can do is create a hospitable environment, one where greatness can thrive. Whether or not anything sprouts is anyone's guess but clearly you've got a better chance if you plant in fertile ground and water regularly! This talk will examine many of the ways companies spill herbicide all over their best teams...

Real world, revenue generating applications to tackle the financial services world online with examples from the new API-based Javascript tools Dow Jones has launched called LiveQuotes and shortly LiveNews.''

Other potential topics of discussion.

If you want to ensure one of these topics is discussed, add it to the schedule above in one of the OPEN slots and add a description of it too.

• Flock (better as a demo?)
• UI design trends and interests
• Looceifer
• Agile development
• Interaction design
• Web design trends
• AJAX
• "Web 2.0" (App Review?)
• Ruby on Rails vs "the other guys"
• Living in the Cloud - storing your life on the Internet (S3, del.icio.us, gmail)
• RSS-OPML
• VoIP
• Information Architecture
• Citizens Journalism esp. blogs
• Sharing, The Commons, DRM, copyright issues
• Google: Why We Trust Them. Why We Don't.

See also the MinneBarDemos page.