me.andering – Willem van den Ende

I hope to write something substantial again, soonish . Meanwhile some announcements you might be interested in.

On June 15 Marc Evers and yours truly are hosting  Agile Open @ the International Association of Facilitators Benelux conference (In De Bovendonk, Hoeven, Noord-Brabant, Netherlands) . This year we are taking our eXPerience with open spaces on the road, and do open space related workshops inside other conferences. The one @ the IAF conference is more meta – a small experience of Open Space followed by reflective practitioners And then some more practice in the Open Space that afternoon, facilitated by Nynke Fokma an participants in the morning workshop.

I have heard registration for the IAF conference is going well (around a hundred registrants), and there are still some places available. The event is partially in Dutch, but I’m sure the Open Space will adapt to the right people .  And the Appreciative Inquiry workshop by Andrew Ballance (parrallel with Agile Open @ IAF) will be in English for sure.  Hope to see you there!

I’m glad to announce the thirteenth instance of the highly succesful eXperience Agile course, thee days of fun learning and experiencing Agile Software Development. The course goes in-depth in both Agile planning and technical practices.

This course will take place on June 27 to 29 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and will most likely be taught in English. We still have a few open places. See the course page if you wish to read a full description.

I prefer small change over big change. I’m talking about transformations, of course . Small transformations make it easy to check if what we want to happen actually happens, and how far of we are. If you’re reading this blog there is a fair chance you are familiar with growing software in small steps – I apply the same principles when working on myself or helping others to improve their (development) performance.

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Agile Open Europe, the Summer 2007 edition is coming up soon (June 11 and 12, Hilversum, the Netherlands). So far we have eleven registrants from five different countries: France, Poland, United States, Great Britain and, last but not least, The Netherlands – host country . That means that we have about nineteen places left. They are going moderately fast. If you are thinking about joining us, please register soon-ish, so we can keep all the rooms we booked.

More about the location

Diana Larsen asked us whether the location was easy to reach from Schiphol/Amsterdam Airport.

We chose Hilversum specifically, because it is not far from Schiphol Airport (www.schiphol.nl) (the main airport, near Amsterdam), hoping to attract people from the US who would be ‘around’ in that time of year anyway…

There is a direct train connection from Schiphol to Hilversum (takes bout 40 minutes, connection about every 15 minutes), and then it is about 10 minutes by Taxi to the conference location. ( train connections are at http://www.ns.nl/ – the ‘english’ switch is on top right of the page). Train stations are called ‘schiphol’ and ‘hilversum’.

I mentioned a Taxi ride, since the location is surrounded by heath with patches of forest, and walking from the bus stop down the entry lane would take you about ten, fifteen minutes maybe…

If we fill up, it will be a very nice location indeed – the conference location is on fairly large grounds, with only a few buildings on it, one will be dedicated to Agile Open. We hope to see you there