me.andering

I just uploaded some more photos from agile open. enjoy!

Agile Open Europe 2008 is over…

This panorama photo of the introduction was made by Harald Walker, who volunteered to be our resident photographer. He’s already posted his impressions :). On thursday it was a bit rainy, so all sessions were inside. Friday was a nice, sunny day, so there were a good number of sessions outside - I spent all day in the garden. The Volksuniversiteit Utrecht has a nice location in the middle of the old centre, with a garden in the back - we always look for a location with nice, green outdoor space and that is easily reached by public transport. Usually these two conflict, not in this case.

We succeeded in simplifying the organisation, and in enrolling some volunteers, so that Marc and I could also participate in sessions I enjoyed (re)newing connections and learning a thing or two from the sessions - maybe more on that later.

Marc Evers and I were a bit buzzed… We hoped, this year, to start announcing agile open earlier (and, unlike last year, not keep repeating ‘we should get started’). Well, unlike last year, we didn’t keep repeating it. We just didn’t get round tuit…

So last week, we finally got together around a whiteboard, decided that we did want to hold it in June (like last year, and as we planned), but we didn’t have a location etc. and didn’t want to spend as much time as last year in sending out invoices, dealing with exceptions etc.

So, we decided to go with an affordable conference location and leave things like hotel, dinner out of the basic package. That means we can send out just one type of invoice - you come two days, or you don’t, and  beside diet preferences there are no options. Well, you can of course volunteer (we got spontaneous offers for that. ) or sponsor.  We also decided to cap the conference at just thirty participants, so we could go with the venue. One of the reasons being, we thought we can’t get that many participants in a month anyway… Surprise, surprise, sending out the invite to a couple of mailinglists, and we’ve already passed the twenty participants mark. And we have some sponsors as well (we didn’t expect many in this timeframe, so we’re pleasantly surprised. Now we have to make sponsor packages and facilitate the other volunteers so we can self-organize )

So, without much further ado, I’m proud to announce the next

Agile Open Europe 2008

will take place in Utrecht, NL on June 5th and 6th. A vibrant place to push the envelope and do business together. And yes, we will find Belgian Beer - one participant listed that as a dietary requirement ;)  Looks like its’ going to be good fun again. See you there!

And if you ’still’ haven’t registered - there’s a handful of places left…

Raphaël Pierquin just put the rough version of the agile open france proceedings online - to enable ‘us bloggers’ to start using the proceedings he uploaded scanned images with an index. A more polished version will follow later. This ‘reduce cycle time’ version already provides lots of value to me. For instance, I can now show you the beautiful notes Antoine Contal made of ‘Beyond Agile’:

Notes of Beyond Agile. Click the image for the full-size scan.

I decided to propose a run of “beyond agile”, so I could try a different way of presenting the cultural patterns before qcon London this wednesday. The runs at xp days last year (then dubbed ‘people vs process’) were well received, and gave us ideas for improvement:

• we needed the question and answer time to get across why we believe these patterns are useful in our work (they help us determine where we are, and decide on a strategy on where / how to go next),
• attendees got the idea that one goes from one pattern to the next in a linear fashion. We then presented it in a linear fashion then, so surprise,surprise…

In this instance, I ditched the slides and presented from flipchart. After presenting the ‘why’, the participants did a round of experiences on the questions:

• ‘did you ever experience people telling you that your mix of ‘agile’ practices is too much process? ‘
• ‘did you ever experience people telling you that your mix of ‘agile’ practices is too little process? ‘

We then gradually constructed the circle, starting with the cultural pattern (’routine’) suggested in the story told by the last participant. Meanwhile, I explained some common choreographies (the arrows), each with their advantages and difficulties through stories:

We discussed more choreographies than could sensibly make the notes, and further discussions over dinner gave me some more inspiration. Even this ‘circular’ drawing follows the same linearity as in Gerald Weinbergs’ books. In wednesdays’ presentation we’re also going to talk about some other choreographies (e.g. going from routine, or routine to oblivious).

As you might guess from the notes, we ran the entire session in french. I needed to ask for some words, and probably my grammar is not up to par, but overall it went much smoother than I expected. The other participants were extremely helpful in letting me and Barry Evans speak as much french as we could, providing us with words when needed, and allowing us to switch back to english when we couldn’t manage in french - less and less frequently needed as the days passed .

So now it’s time to re-order the slides in a quasi-random order - some order that allows us to string stories together in a way that makes sense to the audience, add choreography slides and practice a bit more. I hope to see you at qcon on wednesday.

I went to Agile Open NorthWest last year, and it was a blast! This year’s announcement is eh, just-in-time, so I won’t be able to make it, but I strongly recommend it. Here is there announcement:

Agile Open Northwest, an alliance of agile practitioners in the US Pacific Northwest region, presents Agile Open Northwest 2008.

Our first agile open event, Agile Open Northwest 2007, was held last year and was a great success. This year, we once again invite 100 experienced, collaborative, committed agile practitioners from the Northwest and beyond to join us in tackling the issues around the theme of agile development in the real world.

The Northwest has a wealth of practitioners with years of real-world experience with agile methods and self-organizing teams. Agile Open Northwest offers an opportunity to strengthen our community of practice and co-create the future for agile development. Your commitment to arriving at the beginning and staying until the end both days will ensure we build on conversation after conversation as we engage important questions like:

• Who practices Agile in the Northwest and what is its impact?
• What is “Agile” anyway? What does it look like in organizations?
• What are the technical challenges facing Agile?
• How does Agile co-exist with project management, process control and other governance structures?
• Can we adapt agile practices to our organizations without diluting them?
• Can agile methods work in big, risky projects?
• Can distributed teams use agile approaches?

This event is designed to allow agile practitioners to meet in self-organizing groups where they can share their latest ideas, challenges, hopes, experiences and experiments. We follow an Open Space format to foster collaboration and allow the conference to take its direction from the participants themselves.

• What: An Open Space event discussing agile practices and techniques.
• Where: Seattle Center, in several of the Northwest Rooms.
• When: March 18 and 19, 2008
• Who: Anyone with some degree of experience in agile methods
• Cost: $100 per person, including lunch both days

I was just chatting with Bernard Notarianni. The first Agile Open France is about to happen … Probably on March 7 and 8 (update: it is now March 5,6 and 7), somewhere near Paris - Bernard, Emmanuel and Raphael are finalizing the location details and hope to start marketing next week.

They plan to have the conference site in the general Agile Open website, so I made it bi-lingual, technically at least, translations are probably best left to the french

“France Villandry” by Francisco Antunes

Tomorrow and the day after sees Agile Open California come to life. With a strong theme “Sustainable Agility: Thriving in the Mainstream” , and a good number and variety of participants, it looks like an interesting addition to earlier Agile Opens in Europe and Agile Open Northwest.

The Agile Open 2007 Europe Book of Proceedings is out now!

Monday planning session

It contains photos as well as results of individual sessions. We asked the session conveners to provide (handwritten) notes of each session. Raphael Pierquin scanned the session notes, and combined them with photos of flipcharts and people in the session to PDF documents.

Diana, Stephan, Bernard Zero and Rachel have Fun with Agile 

We ran this as an expiriment to see if we could have an in-between form from open space by-the-book (handwritten proceedings copied to paper - is timely, but costs lots of paper and is not searchable ) and a wiki (does not need paper, is searchable, but participants often leave writing down the results for ‘later’ ).

The book of proceedings is not yet complete, published in the ‘release early, release often’ spirit. The PDF’s are attached to an an individual results page for the session - we hope participants will transcribe some of the  results, so we have both timely as well as searchable results.

 Jan, Nynke, Robert and Erik enjoy the scenery

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!

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