My notes from the afternoon sessions of BarCampHelsinki2

What happens to Seniors? by Summpi
continues/expands on a Lunch time discussion:

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What happens to designers & Programmers when they get to the Senior level (not how do we help OAP's , as i first thought from title).

Options; change company, become Project manager, Start a company, Consultant.

Reactor as an example.
Interesting projects, good team, good tools
Interesting point - not so good pay, but amazing conditions. Only 3 people have left, now approx 100, can pick clients.

Fjord's senior people get pleasure from mentoring.

Conversation morphed into/onto business models (which had been mentioned during Myles session earlier)

Web2.0 - do it cheep first then monetise.

How to get over the gap (only need a few 10k s to get to an intial level), then need to get 6 months to one year money to get to VC level (few 100K's users)

Jaiku - changed purpose. What was their business model.
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Tools for Distributed teams by Antti
Antti had prepared slides, but decided to change to a more group discussion type thing

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Basic idea - Teams should not be distributed.
Discussion : for a more succesful project you must get everyone togeather physically at the start of the project for some period of time (time length depends on number of factors, but few days to a week seemed to be consesous )

Tools used for Project management? Kisko is using Basecamp

37signals - all products are basically a productised wiki.

Yammer.

Campfire used in kisko. Scrumwords.

Timetracking methods;
- enter using emacs & text file this is then parsed via excel.
- checking time spent by svn logs, emails etc.
- Stimmer - Scred team bills by second.
- Github - times stuff via checkins?
- Fogbugz - investigated by

Discussion: Estimating, accuracy and best practices. Joel Spolsky's essay on software estimation was mentioned.
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Beer - Why does it taste so good by me
Originally i had posted this on the Wiki as the i saw that the proposals were getting a little "heavy", and late one evening after slightly more than one glass of beer it seemed like a good idea.
As there was only a few sessions on the board, i put mine up there (if only to fill the last 10 minutes before going to the pub!)
I basically gave a short summary whiteboard presentation of the Wikipedia pages on beer.
2 main types - Lager and Ale (i started off drinking Ale in UK, and prefer it).
Beer is made of only natuarl ingrediants; water, mated grain (normally barley), hops and yeast.

A couple of days later i came across this article about an ancient yeast being used to make beer.

User Experience by Niko Nyman
Niko volunteered to give this as Sergio was not yet back to give his talk.
Niko will be using the same slide set at Web 2.0 Berlin
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Experience is ...
Excellent ideas and pictures.
Worth of the admission price when presented at ??
Example of hyundai - they provide new purchases with lots of reasons for their purchase after they have bought the car, as they know you will get lots of commetns for your unusual choice.
Dvd player with coffe cup button
He has put his slides up on slideshare now

One thing is that the graph on slide 50 was refered to a number of times in the conversation in the pub afterwards.
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An excellent presentation of basic fundamental concepts, my notes/wrtie up is short as the session was near the end of the day, and appart for the graph (which kept being used in the beer session in Kaisla afterwards), there was only a single fundamental idea presented.

Niko pointed out that he does similar workshops at corporates to help managers understand design and user experience fundamentals.

Design Ethics by Sergio Palomo
Presentation and discussion of the ideas presented by Gabriel White. The original can be seen here

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We do not want to be evil.

Ethically is good design enough? Are designer's responsible for their product.
Discussion - Example of guns & knives

Use principles & heuristics
Question - rules for ethics? Is good will enough, or something else

Overview of heuristics.

Discussion - if/how social web sites are addictive

Use of resources (multiple devices not ecological), how to re-use
Make it easy to do double sided printing.
More principles & heuristics - gives a language to have the discussion/negotation.

Discussion on ethics.
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It was a real shame that this came so late in the day, it could be seen/felt that everyone in the room really wanted to take part, but was really just too tired.