Chris and I have spent a fair portion of the past week preparing session proposals for the Agile 2009 conference in Chicago. So far we're submitted five, and have several more in the pipeline, so I've gotten to know my way aorund the submission process…
…and am increasingly impressed with the system that the organizers have designed to plan this conference, and in particular the innovative interface web producer Rachel Davies has put together. What she's done here is one of the first really useful applications of social networking to business, if I'm not mistaken. From now on, when people ask me "What's the big deal about social networking–I mean, what's it good for?" I will point them to this site, which is the best example I've seen of the kind of purpose-driven, large-scale collaborative effort that social networking can accomplish, once we start to think outside of the MyFace/SpaceBook box.
Usually, geek conferences have paleolithic websites that barely function. This in itself is not surprising: architects always live in ugly houses, dog trainers have ill-behaved pets, and software engineers make clunky, stupid websites. But the Agile 2009 conference's website is a functional, form-ful thing of beauty, and the submission process it serves is actually (drumroll…) agile!
How is that? First, it is a self-organizing process, in that anyone can register and submit proposals, which are then open to comments from other registrants, and reviews from a slate of official reviewers and producers. Then it's inspect-and-adapt time: as would-be presenters receive feedback, they may then iterate their proposals up to the deadline.
It's a massive enterprise: Each of the 17 stages has two producers (ie, product owners) who will ultimately choose the program from among the submissions–not a small thing to volunteer for, as there are, as of this writing, just under 1000 of them, and we're a week or more away from the closing date. According to Conference Chair Joanna Rothman, the conference itself will have up to 20 simultaneous sessions going at a time (down from last year's 37, which Rothmann acknowledges was simply overwhelming to attendees, and demoralizing for presenters).
It's exciting and instructive to watch the comments and reviews accrue to our submissions. So far the only slam dunk is a session on Creating Agile Learning Games that Chris is co-presenting with Elisabeth Hendrickson, principal of Quality Tree Software, who is, to put it mildly, a pistol. When I first read Elisabeth's write-up, I thought, what kind of person wouldn't want to go to this? To judge from the comments so far, the answer is: only people who hate puppies and chocolate, ie, no-one. Our Agile 101 proposal is faring well, too, with one reviewer praising its "detail and clarity," which does help me justify my existence as publications editor (whew).
We've also proposed What Makes Agile Teams Succeed (or Fail)? and its counterpart, What Makes Distributed Agile Teams Succeed (or Fail)?, as well as The Agile Game, our spin on the XP Game (we are all about the fun and games at Agile Learning Labs). You will have to register to see the sessions, but it's easy and well worth the trouble, even if just to poke around–but why not propose a session? And by all means, we welcome comments on any of our proposals!
So far the session I'd most like to see hasn't been proposed yet: that would be Rachel Davies giving an experience report on how she designed and built the confererence website….