Dreamfeed

I’m back from the Agile Open conference, still processing everything and recovering a bit. It was quite intense – two days might appear quite short, but is more than enough for such an event.There were 26 participants, a nice mix of people from France, Belgium, UK, and The Netherlands. Everyone who registered, has turned up. Among the participants there were quite a number of people who had participated last year and who came this year again, because of the good experience they had at the previous one.

I found it very enjoyable; I’ve learned and integrated stuff, although I can’t articulate everything yet (I’m still processing…). The learning was not only during the sessions but also in the space between. I want to thank my co-organizers Willem, Nynke, Rob, Vera, and Pascal, and of course all the other participants for making this wonderful experience happen!

Here are a few pictures, to give an impression what it was like.

Agile Open does not have a program in advance. We had collected a number of ideas for sessions on the wiki. We started the first day with proposing session ideas, voting, and creating a schedule:

Presentation Zen session:

The second day. the conference started when people felt it was time to start, and we came up with a schedule for the second day:

We had good weather and did some of the sessions outside:

A small group doing a session on CRC cards:

We had a number of very active sessions, like I’m not a bottleneck, I’m a free man session (about the Theory of Constraints applied to IT), where participants fold hats and boats to gain deeper insights in optimising IT processes:

This rubber duck chicken was the unofficial conference mascotte. I believe the chicken/duck confusion originates from conference participants easily confusing toy ducks and chicken; furthermore, for a game in one of our workshops, we use a duck where the original rules of the game suggest using a chicken

At the end of the conference I saw the duck’s head was broken…the poor thing probably suffered from information overload…

I definitely want to run and experience this conference again! It will probably be around the end of April, beginning of May 2007 … I’ll keep you informed.