me.andering – Willem van den Ende

So, finally, here are my pictures from XP Days London last week. There’s quite a bunch, this time they are grouped by session. I’ll select one from each as a taster.

`Five People in a cab

staring at red lights

A haiku on the table`

Pictures from the eXtreme Tuesday Club

`Lego is so cool`

Pictures from the agile architecture workshop

`Subverting metrics is fun`

dark Pictures from the Do you get what you measure? workshop

`The map is not the terrain`

`it really isn’t`

Dead fish, and other miscellaneous pictures

I found a blog entry by Cedric Girard in French, about xp days Benelux. It’s cool. I hope you can read french, because some of his appreciations are untranslatable.

Cedric writes about how he found the values of Communication, Simplicity and Courage in the way the conference participants gave one-minute presentations on sessions they attended, at the end of the conference. Honest, direct and simple, as he puts it.

We had scheduled one-minute presentations by session organisers on both mornings (Cedric uses the word ‘conferencier’, which means comedian in dutch – several of the presentations were hilarious). The intention was to give participants a more accurate feel for the sessions than a piece of paper or a title can possibly give.

Then, at the bar on Thursday, someone suggested to Vera participants do the same. We decided (courage!) to give it a try. The one minute presentations by participants were as funny as those by presenters, and we got a feel for those sessions we wished we’d attended.

I’m curious who suggested it by the way, as the suggesters’ identity has disappeared in the fog of excellent conversation and drinks apparently .

I measure a decent conference program by the difficulty one has to choose a session – in each timeslot there should be at least two sessions that you really want to attend. Judging from the participants’ presentations and the reactions to them, we succeeded .

In “the previous entry”, I was complaining that I couldn’t find a paper or photo’s of the drift table. Simon Baker informs me this blog entry by Andy Pols has some photo’s of the drift table.

Andy also provides a reference to a paper that is readily downloadable: The drift table, designing for ludic engagement .

Images courtesy of www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/equator/steve_drift_table.html

And, like Andy, I want one!

Well, XP Days London was Fun again. I’ve had a peek at the many photos I took, I’ll publish them later this week, as Rob and I are currently busy preparing the next eXperience Agile course.

In the meantime, I recommend what some other writings on sessions I went to.

• Marko van der Puil on our Temperature Reading Session

• Simon Baker and Pascal van Cauwenberghe on I’m not a bottleneck.

I normally have a funny feeling with keynote sessions. I’ve become so accustomed to interactive sessions, that I find sitting for an hour at a time, watching the slides go by to be a bit boring. Unless the presentation is really engaging. William Gaver ’s presentation on Ludic Design was such a presentation. Unfortunately, I can’t find the videos he used (made by a documentary filmmaker) online. These videos showed very effectively how the drift table (a coffee table with a lense in the middle that lets you drift over the english country side as if you were in a hot air balloon) and another device were used in different ways than the designers anticipated.

It resonates with something I’ve observed from practice quite a bit – people will use your system in ways you’ve never expected. I prefer to be creative with it, and see what we can learn. Others seem to prefer saying `Bad User! This is not the way the system was intended!`…

rant

(Unfortunately, the papers on the drift table (probably written on British taxpayers’ money) seem to be locked behind ACM’s Portal, you have to be a member to access it… Don’t you just love how academic publishing works… ).

/rant

Dave Pollard writes about atomization of software  by using peer produced software consisting of small building blocks. This is a story about how changing only four lines in a template, can make people feel much more welcome in editing a website. I don’t want websites and their ‘back ends’ to be merely usable, I want them to be hospitable (or with a reference to Christopher Alexander, habitable). I’ve been using Wiki2Go produced by my peer Pascal van Cauwenberghe. (by the way ‘toffe peer’ means cool dude in dutch ). It already has a plugin interface on the server side, allowing us to plug in graphs with very little effort. Something that has been bugging me about wikis was what I once considered a feature.

To me, a couple of years ago wikis attracted me for those two main features:

• Easy associative, serendipitous linking by using WikiWords (use a word with several capitals, and it becomes a link. If the corresponding page doesn’t exist yet, you can click on the ? link that appears after the word to create it).
• Easier text formatting than plain html (e.g. by using a * to make a bullet).

With the growing number of wiki implementations that each seem to have their own preference for text formatting, the second one became less and less important. Actually, all those different text formatting engines became annoying. I even developed a prefence for writing in html directly, as that is at least standardized.

I have ranted before about how content management systems can get in the way of my writing process. These days I get to work more often with casual users, for whom the venerable ‘blank text box’ is threatening. You can see a ‘traditional wiki edit screen’ in this screenshot (taken from systemsthinking.net which I co-host):
 

Notice the subtle finger lifting at the text in the bottom ("if you edit, please remember to do it in GoodStyle"), making the bar for a passer-by to edit even higher.

I was ranting to Ira Weinstein about the lack of hospitality in editing websites. He pointed me to fck editor (I find the name a bit dumb, but who am I). Basically, it looks like a regular word processor inside your html place. I was so intrigued by this, that I had to do an experiment with it. Rob Westgeest and I spent half an hour on a spike to add it to an existing wiki. That was enough. It worked. Five different lines in the ‘edit’ template of a wiki, and adding an fckeditor directory on the webserver and that was it. We spent another half an hour trying out the various features, going ‘this is cool, and this, and this…’.

The following is a screenshot from the private wiki on satirworkshops.com, one of several new sites I’m building. I am working with Marc Evers on a handout for the Balancing Act workshop:

(the Satir Change Model picture and the site layout in this screenshot are provided by Nynke Fokma.)
Notice the three rows of icons on the top of the edit box. The ‘page title’ box and the ‘save’ and ‘undo changes’ buttons are the same as in the previous screenshot. Otherwise, the page is pretty much shown as it appears when you’re not editing it:

I find editing a wiki page like this much more comfortable. I often used to click ‘save’ every couple of seconds to see if I formatted bullets correctly, or if the links looked as expected. Now I can keep on typing and adding images, and I save when I’m done, or when Marc wants to take over the keyboard.

What I like most:

• WikiLinks still work.
• Pasting to and from OpenOffice (or the other word processor) works without visible differences.
• I can see the images in the page while I am editing.
• Text layout changes are instant and wysiwig.
• I can still get at the html source if I want to, by clicking on the Source button (unfortunately still necessary, as most, but not all, formatting changes work from within the editor).
• I only needed to modify an edit template to get started, no modifications to the core wiki software were necessary.
• Look and feel, including keyboard combinations, is much like word processors, so the barrier for casual users to edit pages is much lowered.

Having all pages in html can make it fairly easy to convert existing websites to wikis. A small downside is that existing wikis also have to be converted, pages have to be html, rather than wiki formatting. I made a 40 line script for that in ruby that seems to do the trick, converting complete wikis at once. So now I’m converting the closed wiki’s I’m having to see how stable it is. After that, some public wikis are likely to follow.

If you want to try it out, seedwiki hosts free wikis that use the same editor. The fck editor site also has a try out box. If you host wiki’s yourself, I’d suggest you take half an hour to change an edit template and install the editor!

(I know this editor is 100% javascript. Some people who know me may say huh? Well, I changed my mind based on this. With effort, it is possible to make very useful things with javascript. I love ‘voortschrijdend inzicht’ (‘advancing insight’) ).

As Dave Pollard wrote last week

Some audience members volunteered these reasons why people love playing

these games: (a) to become a member of an interesting group, (b) to meet

new like-minded people, (c) to find an outlet for stifled creativity,

(d) to step outside one’s normal personal identity and ‘try on’ a new

one, (e) to master a challenge, (f) to do things anonymously they

wouldn’t dare do in real life, (g) to establish a personal reputation

and hence increase self-esteem. How many of these things do business

collaborations allow employees to do, and how could collaborations start

offering more of these attractors?”

Traveling the XP Days, I find many of these qualities in the community, except for being anonymous. XP Days Benelux saw many new session presenters this year, people roleplaying (things they normally don’t do) during the balancing act, people writing during the freewriting workshop (even those who normally don’t get around to writing) and at the end of the conference participants were happy and hopefully more confident.

So I’ve experienced real organisations, like the xp days, can be as collaborative as virtual games. I’m looking forward to visiting xp days london next Monday and Tuesday .

On monday, I visited Karslruhe to attend XP day Germany . I made some pictures of balancing act, making sense of agile, and the scrum 59 minute game.

Balancing Act:

‘I don’t want to hear about it.’

‘It’s all your fault.’

Making sense of agile:

‘Where does this event fit in the Cynefin model?’

Scrum 59 minutes game:

‘integrating is hard work…’

’…and this a happy customer’s testimonial of Dans’ Doggy Daycare.’

All pictures

(updated, as I posted some broken links)

I’m in Karlsruhe, Germany right now, on the eve of XP Day Germany. Looking forward to another fun installment of Balancing Act – Simple Tools for Feedback, Communication and Courage together with Marc Evers (Nynke Fokma has called in sick, unfortunately).

I’ve just uploaded some XP Days benelux photo’s separated in Thursday and Friday . Enjoy!

Here are some samples, to liven up the blog visually:

Last tuesday at xpnl hosted by Philips Research here in Eindhoven, Yves and Ignace Hanoulle did a trial run of their Leadership Game in preparation for xp days benelux 2005 . ( this entry contains a number of photos – not all aggregators show these ).

The game consisted of three rounds, each with a different leadership style. In each round, the participants had to build lego structures. Also, in each round some of the participants were just observing. I did that in the first round, which gave me a good opportunity to make some photographs and have a look at the stances people take.

Here we have a directive leader (Marthijn Thijssen, in the blue shirt) closely inspecting the work of the team building the cafe. In the first round, the teams built a typical brabant village – a cafe, a church, a farm and a couple of houses (you know what that looks like if you have seen some of Vincent Van Goghs early work, he was from around here).

Something I learnt from this round: if you choose (or have) a directive leadership style, you have to be well aware of what your people are doing. This conversation I overheard will make you look sheepish:

So, how’s the cafe coming along?

Eh, well, we’re building a farm actually.

Three of the four teams in this round finished early, except for the cafe team. That drew the leaders’ attention. In retrospect the cafe team felt the leader broke their flow. On the other hand, they didn’t show much progress and were working very quietly – the other teams were very noisy which gave at least the impression of progress.

The second round was leaderless. Here you can see Rob Westgeest, Marko van der Puil and Bas van Tiel observing the ‘chaos’ that ensued:

The facilitators suggested we have a meeting to start with to determine how to build a church and a couple of houses, but I didn’t feel much like it, so I started building right away with my neighbour. “The other ones can have a meeting if they want to” – I already saw eigtheen people staring at each other about who’s going to start. Teams started to self-organise and things went smoothly and quickly. Exactly one church was being built so that went well.

Except for termination. It seemed people continued building as long as there was material available, and noone (including me, by choice) bothered to ask the customer how they liked the buildings.

Around me, the blocks soon ran out, unlike in the corner, where they had small blocks. There they decided to build a minaret, to make the village a bit more multi-culti.

They continued building until time ran out. Surprising how high a tower of lego blocks one can build.

Overall, this leaderless round delivered, to my mind, the prettiest buildings. Very well suited for creative teams that have to deliver something without a pre-determined outcome. (In fact, most work I do with other independents is leaderless).

The final round saw Nico Mommaerts as a facilitating leader:

This round went fairly well, although the leader lost momentum by being a bit too hands-off – he tasked someone else with leading the initiali meeting, instead of asking for just a scribe. Another thing that seems crucial in this style, is catching the momentum of the group. At one point, teams already had self-selected around a couple of buildings – pyramid, chinese wall, stonehenge and the highly ambitious atomium – and the leader went to all the trouble to write the team members’ names on the whiteboard while everyone was anxious to get started.

Communication with the customer through the facilitator was difficult – as the customers refused to speak directly with the teams, it was unclear what we had to build. Therefore the stonehenge team and the chinese wall team built three different versions, each on a different scale.

In all, we had a lot of fun. I recommend you check this session out if you have the chance (e.g at xp days ). I find Simulations like this are usually fun, and I always learn something from it (although I usually don’t know exactly what that is in advance).

There are some more photos of the leadership game for your viewing pleasure. I hope to see you at

I’m running around this week, so just a quick update on events I’m involved in.

XP Days London have accepted Temperature Reading. That means I’ll go on tour again in November, to XP days Benelux, then Germany and finally London .

The Software Practice Advancement Conference has accepted These are just some of my favourite tools and Balancing Act – Simple tools for Feedback, Courage and Communication

I’m co-sponsoring the next agile seminar , which will be held in Nieuwegein on October 26th. We’re having an interactive session on the Toyota way and a talk on agile outsourcing, and of course… drinks.

On October 27, 28 and 31 Rob Westgeest and yours truly are organising the fourth eXperience Agile training here in Eindhoven. We have a few places left, contact me if you’d like to participate.