Last week I was able to spend two days at the AOSoCal 2011 event with 70 other Agile enthusiasts who are all practicing, thinking about, coaching, consulting, and working\u00a0with Agile Software Development.\u00a0 I had a great time, learned a lot, made a lot of friends, and can’t wait for the next one.<\/p>\n
Like I said several times at the event, I felt surrounded by friends the whole time.\u00a0 These are the sort of people I would hope can attend my funeral to balance out the other folks who will be there to gloat and trash-talk me.\u00a0 Do people still say “trash-talk”?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Each Open Space event has a theme that defines the\u00a0purpose of the gathering.\u00a0 Our theme for AOSoCal 2011 was People, Principles and Performance.\u00a0\u00a0That’s pretty wide open.\u00a0 However, unlike many typical conferences, an Open Space event is invented by the people who show up.\u00a0The\u00a0sessions are not scheduled\u00a0until the morning of the event.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Everyone gathers in a circle, and the\u00a0participants propose session topics by writing the topic on a piece of paper and announcing it to the gathering.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Typically, the proposer takes responsibility for the session, choosing a time and space to hold the session,\u00a0and later facilities the session.\u00a0\u00a0One by one the event schedule it built, and once that is done\u00a0everyone selects the first session they will attend… and then off we go – the Space has been Opened.\u00a0 Sessions can be added at any time, and some get combined or morph into something completely different.\u00a0 Overall it is a very dynamic process.<\/p>\n
You can learn more about the process at Open Space World<\/a>,\u00a0or at the Agile Open site<\/a>, or the Agile Open California<\/a>\u00a0site, and about the AOSoCal event specifically at the AO Southern California<\/a> site.<\/p>\n From my description\u00a0it might be hard to get a picture of how this all works – but it does work, and rather nicely.\u00a0\u00a0I encourage you to attend an Agile Open event\u00a0–\u00a0they are generally very inexpensive and then you could easily experience it for yourself.\u00a0\u00a0All the\u00a0people I’ve talked to who have attended these events have been very pleased they were able to join in.\u00a0<\/p>\n I have been to a variety of Open Space events and the details vary from one another – but overall\u00a0I get a lot more of what I want from a conference than I ever get at the\u00a0more traditional conferences.\u00a0 One thing I have especially enjoyed is that\u00a0the sessions\u00a0are\u00a0engaging, personal, and interactive – I find this keeps me energized throughout the entire two days.\u00a0 Most\u00a0sessions keep things lively using\u00a0facilitated (or non-facilitated) discussions, hands-on activities, or interactive techniques of some sort.\u00a0 I love that I get to spend\u00a0a couple of days\u00a0continuously interacting with\u00a0fascinating people who are discovering, learning, experimenting, living, and inventing what Agile Software Development is all about.\u00a0 How is that for a poorly formed sentence?<\/p>\n In addition, there are endless opportunities to just sit and talk,\u00a0pair program, or take a walk (or whatever) with other attendees.\u00a0 Overall, a lot of fun.<\/p>\n Cheers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What I did last Thursday and Friday Last week I was able to spend two days at the AOSoCal 2011 event with 70 other Agile enthusiasts who are all practicing, thinking about, coaching, consulting, and working\u00a0with Agile Software Development.\u00a0 I had a great time, learned a lot, made a lot of friends, and can’t wait […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}So what is it really like?<\/h3>\n
So, that is what I did last Thursday and Friday<\/h3>\n