MarcEvers

You can read more about my thoughts on agile, software development, and other stuff in my weblog and on my homepage.

I got the idea for co-organizing the AgileOpen conference from different sources.

During summer 2004 I read Richard Gabriel's book Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things. I realised that many conferences are very non-agile in the way their program is created. This includes the XP Day Benelux: we did a call for sessions with a deadline, which means people have to BDUF their session descriptions. We try to provide as much feedback as possible as well as shepherding (for accepted sessions), but it's not really iterative, feedback-driven. Furthermore, we're reviewing session descriptions, not sessions (Duncan Pierce reminded us). This makes it harder to judge the session (unless the session has actually been run before).

We have several ideas how to organize conferences very differently, in a much more agile way. One of the ideas was to organize a conference for more experienced agile practitioners, where they can e.g. discuss and try out new ideas.

I also participated in the Dutch Open 2004 conference (organized by the Dutch Fractal of the Society for Organizational Learning), which used the open space format (with about 50 participants). The open space format worked very well for a group of 50 people who didn't really know each other. It was a special experience.

Willem and I mentioned the idea of an open space agile conference to different people at XP Day conferences in November 2004. People reacted positively, so we decided to just do it...