XP Day Benelux program online
After a fairly open review process and animated discussion in the program committee, the XP Day Belenux 2005 Program is now online.
The only ‘regret’ I’m having about the program, is that I’m not going to have time to attend many sessions, since I’m co-hosting three fun-filled active sessions myself 
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I’m proud of our more open review process this year, where we invited every session organiser to participate in the review process. We did the reviews on a wiki, so that everyone who bothered to review could see how others were working on reviewing sessions.
We were also happy to have plenty of sessions to fill two days instead of one. I’m hoping the program has a bit more air, and the participants have more time to meet each other (e.g. during the conference dinner on Thursday night).
XP Day London is taking this a step further, they are experimenting with a voting system (everyone who sends in a session gets five votes) and have made reviewing obligatory if you want to have a session accepted. I applaud their courage and am curious to find out how this worked for the program committee.
Sending in and reviewing was fun anyway. The program is not finished yet, reviews have closed yesterday. So far it looks like Balancing Act and The Agility of Domain Specificic Languages seem to stand a good chance of being accepted, since they each attracted five votes. Temperature Reading got three votes so far.
As a session organiser, I see one drawback in the voting approach – the Gummibears session description didn’t attract votes in London. It also didn’t attract any feedback, so it’s difficult to learn something for a possible next description.
Some sessions seem to have attracted feedback without votes, possibly because they are more controversial, or don’t fit well with the theme of the conference.
Anyway, exploring what works and what not in sessions, their descriptions and creating a conference program remains fascinating. I hope to write soon about how Rob Westgeest and I use mini-retrospectives to incrementally improve the eXperience Agile course.
