Raphaël Pierquin has scanned the first batch of session notes from Agile Open France.
Some of the attendees are excellent (visual) note takers – even notes of sessions I did not attend speak to me. Enjoy (works best if you can read a bit of French, although the glyphs also speak volumes)
Tag Archive for 'agile-open'
Does this look like a place of work to you?
Hotel Arnold at dawn
To me neither. This was my place of work for three days during Agile Open France. The effect it has on me is hard to explain, I hope the pictures help paint a clearer eh, picture.
Harald Walker shot a little video at Agile Open in June. He edited it, so that it became a nice little explanation of the Open Space “rules” in three minutes.
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.
impression from the everybody is Refactoring, right? session
We decided to cap this conference at just thirty participants. To our surprise, it was sold out in a week and a half, even though we were very late in announcing it (about a month in advance). The reserve list worked well. We had some last-minute cancellations that we were able to fill with participants from the reserve list.
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.
I enjoyed (re)newing connections and learning a thing or two from the sessions – maybe more on that later.From the closing round, I learnt that:
- Capping it at thirty might be a good thing, as some participants mentioned that as a feature – because of the small size it is easy to connect with others. Nynke remarked before the conference, that it probably scales best in time (e.g. more times per year) and place (more places in the world, that is already happening).
- Agile Open is also for “structured people”. I like chaos, and add structure if necessary
Some participants remarked that they were unsure what to expect, and normally like things to be “structured”. After the opening session that fear disappeared. I must say this years’ opening filled the agenda remarkably fast. We added some extra timeslots to get all of the sessions in (note the post-its on top that were sessions still looking for a slot after the opening) - If we can figure out a way to make it less work for us (last year we also had to deal with and take the risk for participant’s hotel reservations), we might go for a residential agile open again in the future. Some participants missed the evening games we had last year.
participants mark sessions they want to go to
group portrait on friday
We used to have a topic incubator on a wiki for the first two agile opens. That helped people convince their boss, but had as a drawback that it was mostly the ‘usual suspects’ who ran sessions. This year and last year, everything was last-minute, and that gave a wider variety of session organisers – this also seems to be influenced by how we explain what to run sessions on. I’ve learnt to emphasisze that it is perfectly ok to run a session on a problem, it doesn’t have to be some prepared solution.
We’re thinking of running a Benelux agile open sooner than this time next year, but are not sure when would be the best time (and what would be the place). Your suggestions are welcome!
Credits: photos by Harald Walker
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.
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