me.andering – Willem van den Ende

Retrospective Hero is a new simulation / role playing workshop I’m developing with Nicole Belilos of Task24. The goal is to let facilitators experience several situations that can happen in real life, and let them experiment with facilitation techniques to make the most of a situation. This is a report of the trial run we held at Agile Open Holland 2009, with an explanation on how the workshop works.

Sandra, one of the product owners, explains her point of view, Serge listens intently as facilitator

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It’s cool to see more spaces opening, the spanish agile user group is hosting Agile Open Spain, 23 & 24 October 2009 .

Xavier Quesada Allue tells me this will be mostly in Spanish. My Spanish stops around ‘donda esta el bano’ and ‘hola’, unfortunately. If yours goes further, this might be for you. Madrid as a location is attractive, and should be easy to reach. No doubt the organisation will be very good as well, and the event is for free!

electronic waterfall by curly_exp( l)osure

In the meantime, if you speak english, why not attend Agile Open Holland – my named cloud is bigger than yours, or is it?, September 10 & 11? Registrations are going fast. At last count we had over 50 participants, with space for about 80. As in previous years it’s looking to attract a good mix of old & new faces, all equally fanatical about uncovering better ways to develop software. It’s not free, but we kept registrations low enough – we hope the value for money makes it a no-brainer; the fee covers part of the costs, but its’ main purpose is to prevent no-shows, so that everybody who wants to attend, can attend. I hope to see you there!

Madrid scenes de rue by George Eastman House

Marc already has the scoop, details and a pretty word cloud to explain the theme, so I’ll keep it short and simple. The next Agile Open conference in the Netherlands will be September 10 & 11, in Baarn.

We chose the theme ‘my method is bigger than yours… or is it?’ because it seems that as this agile software development thing goes mainstream more and more people lose sight of what we perceived was one of the underlying goals of the Agile Manifesto: get continuous experimentation and learning going by developing software and helping others do it across communities – hence the signing by people involved in all ‘lightweight’ methodologies at the time. We like the Named clouds meme and hope it spurs some discussions.

Even if this theme does not speak to you, come to Agile Open Holland anyway – anything goes, and new cloud formations are likely to form during the conference. Named ones in the sessions and the hallways, unnamed ones in the sky (we do hope the sun shines most of the time though..).

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)

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.

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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.

Enjoy!

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…