Motive and opportunity

Wednesday, January 30th, 2013

Sometimes attendees say a conference changed their life.
Perhaps.
If you changed your life as a consequence of participating in an an event, it is you who changed it.
Investigators, on TV at least, look for motive and opportunity for a crime.
For something positive it can be much the same.
Who had the motive? You had the motive to attend the conference, ask questions, perhaps propose a session around something you wanted to share, and you had the motive to do something with it after the fact.
The conference may have provided the opportunity.
In fact, you also supplied part of that opportunity for others, by bringing your questions, interests, observations and puzzles.

Agile Open Holland 2009 – what can I say?

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
I still don’t know what to say exactly about Agile Open Holland 2009, even though it was a couple of weeks ago already. I’ll let the photos taken by Sander, Lucia, see also the video she made) and by Laurens at the event speak for themselves. Starting with some photos by Sander:
IMG_1677 by Sander Verbruggen.
Group photo
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Come defend ‘your named cloud’ at Agile Open Holland

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

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..).

xp2009 beach photos

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

One of the things that made the xp2009 conference exceed my expectations was the beach. Here you can see photos from thursday, May 28th – Patrick Kua hosted an Open Space session on ” is there a lean versus agile versus kanban divide?” that turned into one of the best sessions of the conference. The guys from agical organized an unplanned barbecue, which was great; most participants were there, and the hotel management was very supportive.

I’ll process and post the rest of the photos when time permits – I decided not to do everything in a big batch this time ;) (which sometimes means the batch never gets executed and photos are not published). Tomorrow Marc and I depart to Luzern, Switzerland for the first instance of our Agile Product Development training, so there is not much time left.

Agile Open France proceedings online

Friday, February 6th, 2009

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)

Agile Open France – refreshingly simple

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

Does this look like a place of work to you?

Hotel Arnold at dawn

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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Open Space rules! – the movie

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

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!

upcoming conferences :)

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

I’ll be co-hosting exploring the agile space at the Agile Business Conference (October 2 and 3 in London), and it seems at xp days London as well – People vs Process: Cultural Patterns of Software Organisations both with Marc Evers. I also recommend you check out the continuous integration and testing unconference – CITCON Europe 2007 in Brussels, October 19 and 20.

Agile Open Proceedings

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

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

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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.

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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.

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 Jan, Nynke, Robert and Erik enjoy the scenery

Guerilla Open Space @ XP 2007

Thursday, June 14th, 2007

At Agile Open, I have heard rumours that there is going to be a Guerilla Open Space @ XP 2007. Today I have heard a rumour that the Agile Alliance is going to sponsor it.

I heard good stories on the Open Space being run last year at XP 2006 in Finland – Many attendees, extra rooms needed etc…

This year, the conference organisers decided not to have an Open Space. Charlie Poole, who facilitated it last year, offered to organise it again this year. He heard nothing from the organisers for a long time. At the last moment they said they are not going to have an Open Space. Does the word ‘stonewalling’ sound familiar?

Question: Why would a conference organisation not support a part of the conference that was highly succesful last year??

So, if you are in Como for XP 2007 or otherwise (for the guerilla open space you probably will not have to register), I recommend you check out whether this Guerrilla Open Space rumour is actually true. Quality is guarenteed by the passion of the people who choose to be there ;) .

(Answer: the ‘acadamic paper’ programme at xp200* is weak and people spontaneously apply ‘the law of two feet’ – they go if they can learn or contribute more somewhere else).