How To Organise a Conference

Posted on 2011/05/24 by Olaf

As you might have noticed if you follow this blog or read my tweets… Things that happened in Madrid and during the last weeks on LinkedIn have led to the situation that we’re now organising a conference in Berlin.

ALE2011

The ALE2011 will take place on Sept 7-9 in Berlin. It’ll be a non-profit, community-driven event. Agile Practitioners and idea farmers are invited to bring their spouses and kids, we’ll organise an off-conference program for them to be entertained and get to know this amazing city.

The main program will consist of three tracks of 30 min sessions—new content voted on by the community—and 50% open space. There’ll be keynotes, and we especially invite talks from industry speakers, and talks about topics alien to software development. The diversity of speakers should cover as many European countries as possible. Call for speakers will be opened within a few days.

ALE2o11 emerged from the Agile Lean Europe network which has grown impressively in the past few months and its vision is to connect agile practitioners more visibly and increase collaboration across borders.

The idea was first mentioned as a European alternative to Agile2011 in the US, for people who’s session hadn’t been accepted and/or who could not make the trip. Focus changed quickly to create ALE2011 as the first community event of the nascent ALE network. The community discussed possible dates and places, and Berlin and September where chosen.

How We Started

In the open space at XP2011 in Madrid, a dozen passionate individuals joined my session about the planning of ALE2011. We wrote down and grouped a number of ideas. The results were published on Picasa, and later integrated into a public mind map. We spread the results using Twitter and this blog, and people started to join the team. We quickly discarded the idea of single responsibilities for individuals (ususally called chairs for other conferences, like program chair etc.). We wanted the organisation to be lean and agile and decided to appoint responsibility to self-organising teams.

Sofas

So we came up with the concept of Sofas. Sofas are self-organised teams that take responsibility for a certain topic. There’s a program sofa, a participants sofa, a vision sofa… and a planning sofa that coordinates the different actions and outcomes. The sofas do more or less regular Skype conf calls to discuss and move on. This is all just developing, but my impression so far is that it works quite well. More than 40 people from more than 16 European countries committed to help organising the conference, and more than 30 of these have actually started working so far. Sofas seem to self-organise well and the communication between the sofas is good… That’s partly owned to the fact that I’m currently still keeping track of all progressions, but mainly to our…

Tools

We try to go with as few tools as possible. We use Basecamp to communicate internally, with writeboards, google spreadsheets and the like as we see fit. We use a wordpress site and mindmeister maps to publish information, and Twitter to stream information and links into the network. We discussed and decided against a Scrum or Kanban board for the time being, but that decision will definitely be revisited.

Current Plans

I’ll finish of with a few bits of information regarding our current status:

A pre-registration will open within the next few days to get a few numbers.
Call for Speakers will start shortly thereafter, so start preparing submissions! Early submission will lead to better results.
We found a few options for venues yesterday, I hope we get this sorted this week.
If you want to help, look at the mind map or the Sofas pages to make an educated guess where your help could actually add value before you contact us.
We’re looking for sponsors to keep the event reasonably cheap and to help people get to the conference who otherwise couldn’t afford coming, to maximise diversity in countries. Please contact me if you want to sponsor ALE2011!

I’ll update you on the progress of this project and the experiences we make with this lean and agile style of organising a conference. So far, I love it! Thanks to all organisers for their passionate commitment!

ALE network—What’s in it for Me?

Posted on 2011/05/21 by Olaf

In the past few months, a new network has emerged. But has it? Is this actually a new network?

How I got into ALE

As I told you on this blog a few weeks ago, I “joined” the ALE network after the Play4Agile conference in February, where I met Jurgen Appelo, talked to him about his idea and we created a plan together to join the Agile communities in Europe in something that would be more visible to the outside and more valuable and useful to the agile practicioners than what we had at the time.

ALE faces

So what did we have? I’ll explain my history with the Agile community in Europe (this turned out to be rather long… The bottom line starts below the bullet points…):

I made first contact with a larger group of agilists at the ScrumGathering in Munich in 2009. I attended with a Rugby ball to get into conversations. That worked quite well, I wrote about the experience here, from the ball’s perspective (German, but it is quite funny…). I met Mike Sutton there (among many others, like Liz Keogh, Deborah Preuss, Tobias Mayer, Andrea Tomasini…), we became close friends, started to work on a session about Diversity in Teams. To meet all these people gave me a lot of energy, and being able to keep in touch with these and many others on Twitter amplified that experience.
I went to the AgileCoachCamp Germany last year to finalise the session preparation with Mike (he facilitated the Open Space there). Again, I met a bunch of like-minded people, like Yves Hanoulle, Rachel Davies, Andreas Leidig, Marc Bless and Marc Löffler, who as well have become valuable peers and important friends for me.
Mike and I facilitated our session about diversity at the XP2010 conference in Trondheim, I blogged about that experience here. I again met new people from the European agile community, among others Ken Power and David Anderson (read what I wrote about the guys to find out why), as well as Ralph Miarka, Sergey Dmitriev and Ivana Gancheva.
I started organising the Play4Agile conference in the meantime together with a bunch of creative people passionate for the usage of games in the Agile and Lean space. It became the European counterpart to the AgileGames conference in Boston and was quite a success. But…
In November 2010, I spoke at two XPDays: in Kapellerput (XPDays Benelux) and Hamburg (XPDays Germany). These events unfortunately were scheduled on the same two days, but that gave me the chance to compare them closely as the two experiences merged in my mind… Here’s how that shaped my view about the European Agile community:
XPDays Benelux was the most amazing conference I’ve ever attended. The level of sharing, openness, experience and buzz I dived into was amazing, I met people like Michael Sahota and Portia Tung (who joined Yves’ and my session) and Jurgen Appelo, whom I managed to persuade to come to Play4Agile.
Yves and I built a vision for the Agile community in our session, together with Michael and Portia and more than 20 other people. What astonished me was the feeling of urgency in the group to have a strong international community which stood in contrast to my feeling that the Agile Benelux community already was quite impressively strong and seemed to me to be functioning quite well…
Coming to Germany the day after was like being hit by cold water in comparison. The XPDays HH were a good conference, don’t get me wrong, and again I met a bunch of great friends and peers there, but… The feeling of community and internationality I had experienced in Kapellerput was lacking there, totally. It’s hard to put into words, but all the exchanges were personal, even in small groups… But there was no feeling of overall connectedness and sharing, of a common goal and a well-functioning team…
Play4Agile was the next time I experienced such an exchange, such a feeling of common purpose in a big international group. A sharing of common values and principles, most important that we don’t do this for money, but to make a lasting difference. Ungently facilitated by Michael Sahota, Jurgen and I developed the idea of how to energise the network of Lean and Agile practitioners in Europe, joined by Ken and Andreas and later more people to take the model of the Eurovision Song Contest and create the plan to gather people from many European countries at XP2011 in Madrid.

A small group of people from different countries, Jurgen from the Netherlands, me from Germany, Ken from Ireland, Sergey from Norway, Vasco Duarte from Finland and Jacopo Romei from Italy, formed a team to make this possible. Using the LinkedIn ALE group and Twitter, we engaged people from all over Europe to find a name, a logo, organise the envisioning session and a world cafe in Madrid. The idea to create a conference was born and the decision was made to do in Berlin. It has been fun to facilitate this growth and it still is. It has been a lot of effort, as well. And now I’m leading the organisation of a conference… So, why do I do this?

What I Value and What I Need

I value human interaction, open sharing of knowledge and experiences, and I love to enable teams and organisations to work more effectively. I am an agile coach. Being a coach is more like a mission than a job. I want to make a difference. Lead by example, teach and mentor agile values and practices, give honest feedback, these are things I do, and love, but they’re taking a lot of energy. Occasionally I get feedback from clients that gives me positive energy, but generally the energy flows from me into the organisations and teams I work with. To not loose momentum and run out of power, I need the community to replenish. And I found out by experiment that giving to the community is the best, most effective and fastest way to get that energy. And I have an obvious talent for networking, so it’s a natural thing for me to do this. I found the European community to lack visibility, and a platform so that others could more easily find their way in. And find the right people once they got in. I have seen ALE as an opportunity to achieve this, and I think the current development proves my point. All over Europe, people start to notice, start to come together and start working on amazing things, like agile couchsurfing, ALESOS, and last but not least the conference… For a list of initiatives, visit the ALE network site or the LinkedIn group… This week, we had the first ever bathtub conference!

ALE, What’s the Point?

A discussion with this title started a week ago in the group. The original post asked for the difference between ALE and the “existing agile community”. To me, there is no difference. We just gave it a name and found people who like it. Yet some people are skeptic. I welcome that, skeptic is my middle name—look at the subtitle of this blog. And I stated before that I was very skeptic regarding Jurgen’s motives to start this. Actually talking to him about his goals, his vision, what he expected from the network (the answer to all three basically being “what ever the community decides”, got my buy-in. I have my own goals with this network (which I stated in this post) just like everybody else. And they’re not the same as everybody else’s, that’s ok. Just please stop accusing us of being exclusive (we aren’t) or even xenophobic (that’s ridiculous). And don’t try to misuse this network for your personal goals, like money. We might become rude. I know I will. We all earn money with agile, but some do agile FOR the money. If you’re one of those, don’t discuss with me. I don’t care about being nice, I care about doing good. If you want to be paid for doing good, fine, I want that too. If you only do good if you’re paid… You get my point.

Bottom Line

I get energy from the agile communities in Europe. I want other people to get that energy too. Not everyone uses Twitter as much as I am, and some people need easier paths to find the right information for their needs. Make it more visible. Make us more connected. Make us collaborate better, and have intense and regular dialogue about what we do and how we do it, why we sometimes succeed and why we often fail. I love this network and I invite you to join us. We need Linchpins to change the world, so let’s gather and go make a difference!

German Vision for the ALE Network

Posted on 2011/05/21 by Olaf

During the past weeks, multiple events took place in Germany and elsewhere in Europe to create a vision for the growing ALE network. This is my summary of the German vision we used to seed our input into the envisioning session in Madrid:

German Vision for the ALE Network on Prezi

A new network is growing… And I’m amazed to be a part of it.

ALE2011 Unconference in Berlin – Status Updates

Posted on 2011/05/18 by Olaf

When And Where?

Robert Buchholz made the very intelligent suggestion to add the date of the event to this post.

The conference will happen on September 7-9, 2011 in Berlin. Venue is being selected… And now we also have a website.

Updates

I’ll stop updating this page with sofa fellow changes and commitments now, as of May 22, 2011. Contents of this page has moved to the official ALE2011 site, specifically to Who’s in Charge? and the Sofa pages… If you make additional commitments or suggestions on this post, I’ll update the pages there.

What happened?

It’s been only two weeks since the community decided to bring the ALE2011 conference to Berlin. As I posted last week, I’m organising that conference—the first gathering of the ALE network that will bring together idea farmers and practitioners from most European countries… Where Europe either means that your country is taking part in the Eurovision Song Contest or, that you contribute to the growth of the ALE network. So basically, this event is open to anyone interested, but constraints are tight to make sure we get the most diversity in speakers and participants regarding the number of countries involved. All of this information is still discussed, so please consider it as draft and give us your ideas through comments or on the LinkedIn group thread.

Continue reading →

ALE Network World Café Rough-Up

Posted on 2011/05/14 by Olaf

Important: Jurgen copied these results on single pages on the ALEnetwork website. Any not yet corrected details please comment on that side…

Thanks, Jurgen!

On May 10, 2011 at XP2011 in Madrid, we created a vision for the ALE Network. On May 11, we used this vision to seed a world café session to define the actual benefits we expected from the network. These were captured on Flipcharts, I posted pictures to Picasa earlier. The nicest flipchart was this:

Let Jurgen and Olaf do it all!

I transcribed all the flipcharts now and put all the data into a list, with patient help by Catia Oliveira. We’ll divide the different topics into pages on the ALEnetwork site later and let you work on expanding the ideas. People commited to those topics to take responsibility, signing with emails and Twitter ids. We tried our best to transcribe those names, but we might have got something wrong… Apologies for that, please correct this in the comments.

Values

We value Values over Manifestos

and:

Knowledge over Money
Open Communities over Alliances
Peer Appreciation over Certification
People over Business

Next Action: Devise Principles:-)

8 votes

Let Jurgen and Olaf do all!

Marc Löffler, JBRainsberger

5 votes

ALE SOS

Makes people respond promptly! -Tweet ? -LinkedIn? —> Medium

#ALESOS

JBRAinsberger, Johannes Brodwall, Olaf, Andrea Provaglio, ArneAhl, Michael Leber, @eelco1969, Marc Löffler, @mgaewsg, Ralph Miarka, Patrick Verheij

11 votes

Agile Couch (Coach) Surfing

Scrum Master
Journeymen
City Calendar of Events (The Agile Alliance is sponsoring visiting user groups!)
Au-pair ScrumMaster
Pair Coaching
“I’m coming to town, what’s up?”
“I’m coming to town, can I help?”
“I’m coming to town, wanna meet?”
Also for newbies

@hell03610, Johannes Brodwall, Pablo Pernot

10 votes

ALE travel network

use your local network
give away air miles
help organise visits
find people who can provide accomodation
local knowledge to deal with impediments
low cost accomodation
travel tips help people from the community travel more easily within Europe

@hell03610, Alex Boly, Patrick Verheij, @jgomesz

13 votes

Coaching Circles

Agreement btw a small # of People to discuss and share Problems.

Trust!

4 Votes

Agile Game Repository

know available games
exchange them easily
Photo Video
Find out how to do this in #ALE

9 votes

Comment (Olaf, Yves): Such a platform already exists: tastycupcakes.org we should not create a competition!

Bring Speaker to User Group

Fund for Travel Expense
?? work of Speakers
?? work of local sponsors

Agile Visiting Speakers in User Groups

Speakers export exchange
User Groups
Sponsors

Nick Oostvogels, Alex Boly, Arne Ahl, @hell03610, Patrick Verheij, Marc Löffler, Cesario Ramos

15 votes

European AL Idea Farm

Idea Farm (Ville)
Free CC license
experimental ideas (#half baked)
Fishbowl sessions
Value proposition towards companies
Reduce threshold for sharing
Visibility about current projects
Including failure reports
Share experiences + get questions

Michael Leber, Olaf Lewitz, @ziobrando

5 votes

Agile StackExchange

Like Stackoverflow.com
eg how to use user stories in fixed price projects
with “Agile Games” tag

5 votes

Johannes Brodwall, JBRainsberger, Filipe Correia

Euro Agile Blogger Network

European Idea Farm

Methods
Materials
Experiences
Failures, Successes
Techniques
Knowledge

Agile Stackexchange?

4 votes

Marc Löffler (+Olaf)

Expert Exchange

List of People
Expertise
Contact info
etc
Coaching/Teaching/Organising/Speaking
Help others

@pzol, Andrea Provaglio, @kerolep, @zuzuzka, Patrick Verheij

9 votes

ALE facebook

aka Professional Friends

(large influencer group-lobbying?)

to make agile & lean the mainstream sw-dev method for the economic benefit of Europe – e.g. contracts, education, …

Note by Olaf, Yves: entaggle.com does this already!

ALE book(s)

open source Topics:
Agile at Scale
ScrumBan
Lean-Scrum-Integration
With Flags on the Cover

Scenario: 20 experts’ stories on a subject + conclusions

“Agile Skill 2011”
“ALE Signature Series”
Goal (in contrast to a Wiki): Edited, Shipped!

Ken Power, Olaf, Marc Löffler, Pablo Pernot, Arne Ahl, @jgutip, Marc Clemens, Andrea Heck, Patrick Verheij, rflores at cein dot es, Michael Leber, @eelco1969, Ralph Miarka, Pasi, Oulu

15 votes

Cross-pollinating with other communities

eg Beyond Budgeting, Lean Manufacturing

6 votes

@mgzewsj

Experience Exchange

forums for telling stories
and finding people’s stories

Freely available mock companies (to get around NDAs)

find someone who failed at a telco Scrum adoption

Share failure stories

Blog, keywords, author, name

experience exchange, fishbowl discussions

Emily Bache, @mgzewsj, @MLainez

6 votes

Lean Agile Koine’

Social Network
Community tool
ALE gathering (at least one person from each country) “maybe open conference”
Share Knowledge on Lean/Agile
Regional/International
Research Contribution
Network for cross-pollinating new ideas

4 votes

Catia Oliveira, Fabio Armani

Collecting Field Experiences

Webinar
Contact info available
Agile “dinner”-event at the same time in different countries
& keep in touch on Twitter

Cesario, Pablo Pernot

2 votes

Online Information Sharing

Pan-Euro User Group Calendar
Agile-Lean-Europe Community Wiki (access permanent information)
No local websites
Easily Accessible X-border meetups (–> facilitate in-person meeting)
Online Directory of Coaches (eg TDD)

2 votes

Training Apprentices

Almost free training (for the apprentice)
Co-teaching & Apprenticeships
Improve training & coaching techniques
Exchange training-techniques
Open Apprenticeship at the customer
Multiple Brands
Business Model
offer to let network contacts join you when you train- they learn to give your class and can go on to give it without you

@hell03610, JBRainsberger, Alex Boly, Emily Bache, Andrea Provaglio, @eelco1969, Michael Leber

13 votes

ALE train

ALE train and beers
sponsor?
Online Identity Blog
XP2012 and ALE??
AL/XP ALE Probing
Circle Route Train

Jacopo Romei, Fabio Armani

14 votes

ALE fractal neuronal model

connection/synapsis national/regional/local Local ALE meetups bring people together locally feed into broader ALE community Local ALE meetups with guest speakers (well-known) joining remotely (eg Skype) Feedback to local community what happened at conference Get conference speakers to give their talk again via Skype to local ALE group

See people you not normally see via Skype ?? been done

Fabio, Filipe, Ken Power, rflores at cein dot es

11 votes

Failcon

-each session: failure and what can we learn?
-experienceing failure workshops
– presenting a problem
– doctor’s appointment

Nick Oostvogels, @jorgeuriarte

9 votes

ALE cooking

prepare something together and consume it too (no votes)

Agile @Universities

Bring Agile Awareness in Universities to the same level across Europe
Agile Uni meetups
Visualise state of Agile in countries and companies
Coordinated Cross-Europe Event where speakers go into universities to talk about Agile/Lean
“Agile University Day”
European Agile Masters Degree (-1 note?)
University Students mentoring for Student Projects
University Students Agile talks on Campus
Establish a group exports to develop European Agile Masters Programme including industry and academy (-1 ?)

@mlainez, xavi.albaladejo at gmail dot com, @mgaewsj, Ralph Miarka, Ken Power, @eelco1969, Nils Wloka, Nick Oostvogels, Filipe, Michael Leber, @holzig, @jorgeuriarte, Fabio Armani, Pasi, Oulu

14 votes

Agile Campus Project

campus tour
spread success stories of agile courses
spread the word in universities
list what is being done where by whom
help with agile approaches university projects
list European University courses with Agile in the curricula (with contact person) Spread the word about agile sw dev at universities in Europe Nils @kovolep @pzol @jgutip 10 votes

Agile Research

Bring together academics and industry partners
also to apply for EU research funding on Agile and Lean topics

rflores at cein dot es, Ken Power, Pasi

4 votes

Think Tank

for companies to access and learn
like a guild
how to scale
finding experts
appreciate peers
NO CERTIFICATION!
open companies to share
allow to share failure experiences
connected to research!
inspiring Students at Universities

13 votes

fabio armani, @eelco1969, e dot rustenburg at gmail, michael leber, arne ahl, nils flores

Double ALE Loop

IP programme for FP7 on lean agile applying double loop learning ??
Research group cooperation
Lobbying Knowledge Sharing/Web Semantic
Thesaurus
Pull system for talk
Talk proposal, position papers

Pasi Fabio

6 votes

I’m organising a Conference!

Posted on 2011/05/13 by Olaf

My major learning from my open space session about the organisation of the ALE2011 conference at the XP2011 is:
To organise an amazing conference, you just need two things:

An amazing crowd, and
One hour.

Planning a Conference

Yesterday, on May 12, 2011, in the Open Space at the XP2011 in Madrid, about a dozen people met and created the main design for a new kind of conference. This is our current plan (pictures of the original session results are here):

The ALE2011 will take place in Berlin, Germany, from Sept 7-9, 2011.

What makes it special?

There are some aspects we build into the plan that make this as special type of conference. This conference is organised by and meant to strengthen the new ALE network. Therefore, it will

have speakers and participants evenly distributed across European Countries.
host spouses and children as well as practicioners and idea farmers from the European Lean/Agile community.
ask every participant to prepare a lightning talk, and to show their commitment to the conference by submitting a positioning paper.
be seeded by 30 min talks in the mornings, continued by open space focusing on the collaboration across Europe.
constrain the number of participants to 200 people.

How can you contribute?

Please get in touch with me through Twitter, the ALE2011, Berlin discussion in the Agile Lean Europe (ALE) LinkedIn Group, or by mail, and tell me how and what you could contribute.

This conference has Sofas instead of Chairs. Some still need some more people to sit upon them. We have:

A Planning Sofa (Sergey, Cat, John, Cesario, and me)
A Local Sofa (Me, taking care of the things in Berlin—I need support for that)
The most amazing Open Space facilitator: Mike Sutton from Wizewerx
An Exciter Sofa: Erik Lundh, Jens Hoffmann
A Program Sofa: Marcin Floryan
A Participants Sofa: Marc Clemens
An Industry Partner Sofa: Andrea Heck, Ken Power
A Goal Sofa (Jurgen Appelo)
A Volunteer Sofa (Greg Dziemidovicz)
A Website Sofa (Alex)

We need:

A Speakers Sofa
Sponsors (you may contact me but it’ll take a few days of sorting out before I can tell you details)
an organising professional (I do have someone in mind, so please don’t storm me now)
and some unimportant things like a venue…

We’ll get that sorted, I’ll keep you posted. What A Week!