People are all the same…
I wanted Agile Open 2006 to have an atmosphere like Cheers:
‘I wanna be where everybody knows my name’ comic by Adam Hally
and it did. As I didn’t tell you yesterday (Change club), I’m now at european consultants camp. Can’t tell you what is going on there right now, as we probably don’t have an internet connection. Not having an internet connection at a conference gives it a much higher level of “off-siteness”, getting people to talk to each other, rather than talk back home, or drift off the internet. Some people bring their families, so they don’t even have to call back.
I put up a mailing list for this year’s participants, two weeks before the start of the conference. That works great as a way to (re)know our names. We had a thread of “requests for sessions”, where participants request a topic they would like to explore, and others respond with what they have to offer.
I wanted to have a “parts party” because I heard about it, but don’t know exactly what it is. Nynke Fokma, Bent Adersen and Marco Riccioni offered to host one. They discussed some of the parameters and properties of it on the list, so other participants know what to expect, and already have something to refer back to in case they’d later like to run one of their own.
The comic in this post comes from the series “Happy Go Lucky” by Repoort.
