me.andering – Willem van den Ende

Remembering names and faces after a conference can be difficult. At agile open Raphaël Pierquin suggested we make a group photo, so everyone could add their name to the photo.

To make it easier to find ourselves back in the picture Raphaël used gimp and his daughter’s felt pen to create numbered outlines:

Getting this outline was a nice surprise. If you were at agile open, please add your name to the pictures page on the wiki.

I managed to get the agile open photos online, a big thank you goes out to Marc Evers , who put my camera to good use. Having someone else take pictures as well freed me up to be more present during sessions. (draw parallells with pair programming).

Some photo’s to give a taste (there are many more photos from agile open than I can fit in a blog):

participants making the program

Coding Dojo (Randori)

break

break

Current reality trees don’t bite

round table discussion

Zen presentation

drawing carousel

drawing is released, even though it is not really finished…

thursday’s schedule

Friday’s schedule

Tom and Marc discussing

Bernard and Raphael discussing

xp game

waiting until the closing session wants to start.

I’m recovering from agile open, still feeling somewhat unconfenced / conferenced out . I liked it a lot, biased as always, because I co-organize it… Unlike at some other conferences I visited recently, I was able to attend a couple of sessions I didn’t organize

last and not least, the planned unprepared session, and after that the unscheduled unprepared session, outside on the terrace with wine and excellent conversation.

I believe we succeeded to strike a balance between structure and un-structure, keeping in mind the goal for this conference is openness, and maximum participation from everyone. On the second day we changed several things in the structure based on suggestions made during the opening that day. I had the feeling everyone was feeling more comfortable on the second day, because everyone knew each other a bit better. We may add some get-to-know-your-fellow-participants activity for a next event.

Raphaël suggested we make a group photo, so we can remember who’s who later. Unfortunately, when we got around to it, some people had already left. The mostly broad smiles say more than I could about this event. Wonder full:

Having Agile Open, is like having a birthday. A big surprise, and i’m not sure what I’m going to get…

It seems we are not slacking off (as I feared in Princess Risk ). We had a standup meeting over skype yesterday, that gave a lot of focus. We have virtual ‘standup’ meetings in a chat window. They last a bit longer than ordinary standups, passing the ‘talking stick’ is more difficult. But they are usually good fun, and quite effective.

One thing we were puzzled about, was wether to do a last-minute marketing effort. With twentyfour participants and seventeen ideas for sessions, it is looking to be a fun-filled conference. Maybe more participants would be even more fun? I don’t know. Today is the last day you can still join though

Ideas for sessions will be welcome until the start of the conference, and possibly on the second day of the conference as well.

As Agile Open is drawing near, pascal writes about how we manage risk. We use a simple brainstorming process, filling the risk table from left to right (event/what , probability, impact, mitigation). This has proven very effective. I believe it also helps us to relax, and share our concerns. The biggest concern for me right now is meta – after organizing a couple of conferences (three xp days and now the second agile open), we risk becoming unfocused.

Pascal mentioned the princess risk – the risk that a princess arrives at the conference. To him it signifies risks we did not anticipate in the past. These things will happen. For me, the princess risk entry in the risk table now also signifies as a call for myself to stay vigilant. The probability is stated as 50%. After three xp days benelux and one agile open, we should really have updated it to 25%, as a princess arrived at only one of those four events… (we introduced the risk after the second xp days benelux, at which a Belgian princess showed up, and threw us into chaos).

Unanticipated risks happen. Preparing scenarios prepares us mentally – we are aware that there are things that will not go as planned. Last year there was also at least one good thing that happened unexpectedly for me. Agile Open helped someone change his life.

It changed mine too. Co-facilitating an experiential workshop on congruent communication made a deep impression on me. I couldn’t really believe I was doing that, and yet I was doing it . We’ve continued to develop this workshop as we are making the tools we use our own. We’ve ran it in various configurations, most recently at SPA and xp days france. We’ll be running it again at agile2006, where it has been accepted as a tutorial (“Balancing act – simple tools for feedback, communication and courage” – I would include a link, but the programme seems to be online as a PDF only).

I’m glad. Risk is only a Princess – Value is King (or Queen ) at agile open.

Continuous Integration and Testing Conference April 7-8, 2006 – Chicago, IL, USA. I won’t be able to attend, but this open space event might be worth your while. I don’t know the organisers, but they seem to know themselves pretty well :

“Jeffrey and Paul have been planning the conference for more than 9 months and feel that just doing it is better than languishing in analysis paralysis. Early April was targetted as a good time.”

I hope next year Jeffrey and Paul will call it an unconference. At the agile open last year we had some participants who had missed the fact there was no conference program. On the other hand, most of the CITCON site is about open space and the open space rules
Through Lasse’s weblog – CITCON in Chicago

» Around the MashupCamp fire | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Hadn’t heard about this before, it’s happening now apparently. Mashup camp. Made me think of mashups (two music tracks combined, a fast and easy way to create remixes these days). Apparently it is about combining API’s (of the web 2.0 kind) in various ways.

It’s always nice to see the now familiar open space rules posted on a flipover, and seeing the photo of Ward Cunningham, I’m curious if he’s going to come up with something as simple and fascinating as the Wiki again. The session title “Tools for Ah-has: Things that help you make and share ideas” sounds tempting…

photo by Cirne