Agile Open Spain, 23 & 24 October 2009

Monday, August 17th, 2009

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

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 rueMadrid scenes de rue by George Eastman House

Agile Open California – thriving in the mainstream

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

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.

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!

img_3580.jpg

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.

img_3623.jpg

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.

img_3629.jpg

 Jan, Nynke, Robert and Erik enjoy the scenery

Agile Open Europe, Summer 2007 Edition

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

smiling faceAgile 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…

agile open logo

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 :)

Opening the space

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006

I’m having an open space themed week:

  • I’m going to CITCON in London – the unconference on continous integration and testing, friday evening and saturday.
  • Preparations for the International Open Space Technology Training in Berlin (November 2 through to 9) have started. Another participant has created a mailing list, to virtually open the space, and the organisers inform us there are still a few places available (currently 41 participants, 15 places left). I’m looking forward to this. Since leaving university I haven’t been on a course this long… (it’s a full week, including a weekend).
  • Two sessions in the XP Days Benelux program have joined forces to form an open space track divided over two afternoons. Thursday afternoon features a themed open space track on How can your business benefit from agile facilitated by Anko Tijman and friday afternoon wil be ‘open’ open space (the session previously known as the planned unprepared session) intended to let the participants reflect on sessions they’ve attended so far and discuss important last-minute topics. We’ve got an energetic bunch of people together preparing these – if the sessions are going to be as much fun as the preparation… :) A manager says:

    I spend a lot of my time dealing with and talking to managers about agility and how the principles of XP are relevant to the non programmers in the organisation. It may seem obvious to us but sometimes it needs to be spelled out. There is a sort of fear of loss of control from most of the management people I talk to. I have to assure them that control is an illusion at the best of times and that trust is a better, more productive way. One of the things I like about the open open session is that it grasps that fear and says “ok lets see what happens if you do relinquish control – will people mutiny and waste time or will they rally and try to address the issues.”. We can use these sessions to show that people will naturally allow the real priorities to surface and in a more direct way than they might otherwise be able to on a rigid agenda.

  • Diana Larsen said at Agile2006 there might be an american open space conference on agile. Her company’s event calendar says its on January 30 – 31, 2007 and it goes by the name Agile Open NW in Portland, OR USA. More Agile Opens :) . The website isn’t up yet apparently, hope it will be soon.

Continuous Integration and Testing (un)Conference near…

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

The second continuous integration & testing conference (still labeled conference, still Open Space) is taking place in London, October 6 and 7, which is a bit closer to me than last years’ in Chicago. I’ve heard good things about CITCON (don’t know exactly what…) and as continuous integration and integration and acceptance testing are still areas with lots of development and challenges, this is bound to be interesting again.

This would also be the first conference announcement I got through a comment on this blog, so the organisers have an interesting approach to marketing at least :) .

Oh, and did I mention this conference is free (as in free beer)? – it would also be free as in free software, as the contents are up to you, the potential participants…

I’m sure

Wednesday, May 24th, 2006

European consultants camp is now over. This post was, like the others this week, written beforehand. I’m sure…

it was amazing

‘it was pretty much amazing’ comic by Adam Hally

Because beforehand the sessions requested and suggested, the people attending and the location looked pretty much amazing. Some who couldn’t attend were already looking forwared to next years’ camp…

I’m likely to go really offline for a couple of days. Time for some R&R after intensive days of conferring, drinking and laughing :) .

People are all the same…

Sunday, May 21st, 2006

I wanted Agile Open 2006 to have an atmosphere like Cheers:

I wanna be where everybody knows my name comic, by Repoort

‘I wanna be where everybody knows my name’ comic by Adam Hally

and it did. As I didn’t tell you yesterday (Change club), I’m now at european consultants camp. Can’t tell you what is going on there right now, as we probably don’t have an internet connection. Not having an internet connection at a conference gives it a much higher level of “off-siteness”, getting people to talk to each other, rather than talk back home, or drift off the internet. Some people bring their families, so they don’t even have to call back.

I put up a mailing list for this year’s participants, two weeks before the start of the conference. That works great as a way to (re)know our names. We had a thread of “requests for sessions”, where participants request a topic they would like to explore, and others respond with what they have to offer.

I wanted to have a “parts party” because I heard about it, but don’t know exactly what it is. Nynke Fokma, Bent Adersen and Marco Riccioni offered to host one. They discussed some of the parameters and properties of it on the list, so other participants know what to expect, and already have something to refer back to in case they’d later like to run one of their own.

The comic in this post comes from the series “Happy Go Lucky” by Repoort.

Change club

Saturday, May 20th, 2006

I’m driving down to a small seaside town in France to participate in an open space unconference for consultants but I can’t tell you about it…
fight club comic by Repoort

‘Fight club’ comic by Adam Hally