Refreshing by Louise Docker

So, whenever I’m working for a client in London, or otherwise visiting the UK, I try to massage my schedule so that I can be in London on a tuesday (not very often, as I still spend most of my time in the Netherlands or otherwise travelling). As the Michelin guide would say: worth a detour, and the london XP days are always worth the trip. I’ll be making that trip again in December for XP Days, and hope to organize the Open Space there with Rachel Davies. XTC is loosely coupled, so things magically seem to happen and it ‘just works’ – participants organize the weekly meeting, and the conference is organized without much fuss. (In case you want to propose a session for the ‘organized’ track, the deadline is today, and the review process is open). It’s a great place to try out new things, like the Haskell Dojo Mike Hill and I ran in the spring, not only is there great enthusiasm, the breadth and depth of knowledge of who ever is there is amazing, and I’m not sure how I would have otherwise met them.

As Rachel already said it’s hard to convey the energy that is there, but I’m shure that without XTC many ways of developing better software would never have been uncovered.

Sunset & the Thinker by Esparta Palma

Whenever I travel back from an eXtreme Tuesday Club meeting, there’s always lots to think about. So, I hope to see you there (again) some time. Cheers!

Maybe because of the delay (we skipped May eventually) we not only have more items, they are also longer. We try to keep the newsletter short, but the things we discussed at conferences and while making the product development training gave us some inspiration to explain some topics in more detail. If the topics pique your interest, you can read it online or subscribe.

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.

All of the sessions were in French. It was cool to see an american (Charlie Poole) and a canadian (J.B. Rainsberger) do presentations in French :

The thursday night dinner / boat trip was also very nice.

To introduce the sessions, all presenters did one minute presentations, which worked very well to warm up the audience.

I co-facilitated a run of Simple tools for communication (‘des outils simple pour le communication’) with Marc Evers again (also known as Balancing Act), this time supported by Laurent Bossavit and Emmanuel Gaillot, who helped us out with translating to French, doing roleplays and facilitation.

We scaled this workshop in several dimensions. Doing it in French was more difficult than doing it in English or German, turnout was the largest we had so far for this workshop (between 25 and 30 people). As it requires quite a bit of facilitation and safety, we are very careful not to scale it too quickly.

We did exercises and demonstrations about coping stances, self other and context, the satir change model, and as a roundup we did a Temperature Reading. Near the end, the audience was pretty much exhausted. Judging from the reactions, the laughs, and the stories participants roleplayed, the workshop was a success.

I haven’t much to say about it right now, still recovering from excellent dinners, wine, conversation and enjoyable sessions. And I’m preparing for the next workshop, this afternoon I’m co-hosting the ‘these are just some of my favorite tools’ workshop at SPA with Marc Evers and Emmanuel Gaillot. I hope the pictures speak for themselves.