Deborah Hartmann and myself are trying to organize an open space conference for Agile Coaches. If you have attended SDTConf, it’s going to be very similar. We are considering Spring 2008 as our time frame for the first conference [or should I say unconference].

We are seeking helping in a lot of areas:

• Help finding a venue : University with a lot of classrooms and conference rooms will be ideal. Having on campus accommodation would be wonderful. Any part of US is fine, as far as it has an international airport real close
• Volunteers: Help us build and run this conference
• Sponsors: We plan to keep the conference free [or charge a min amount say 50-100 USD]. But we need companies to sponsor website, food, t-shirts, evening outings, stationaries, etc
• Participants: Keep success factor to any conference is not the number of participants but the quality of participants. We are really looking forward to expert practitioners who coach agile teams on a daily basis
• Marketing : We need to spread the word out. We believe in peer-to-peer word of mouth marketing model. Please help us spread the word around
• I’m sure we need a lot more help

We are planning to start off in US, but we really want this to be an international conference run in the BarCamp style, where any one can run this. I promise no Royalties, no non-sense. If you are passionate about this topic and there is not one happening in your area, take the initiative and we’ll  be there to help you.

More details: http://agilecoachcamp.org

Yesterday evening we kicked off the second SDTConf. This year the conference is hosted by Penn State University, York, PA. Find more details on the conference website.

The response this year has been mixed. We got a great list of sponsors and everything is taken care of from the conference point of view. We have food, T-Shirts, evening drinks, pretty much everything I need covered. Thanks to our sponsors.

In terms of the participants, we had about 35 people who showed up yesterday. I know 8-10 more people who are going to come in today. So I think we’ll have a good 50 people at the conference. 50 is not bad, but I was hoping to have more people than what we had at last year’s conference [which was 68 people]. Having said that, I’m not really a numbers person. I perfectly fine with less people. [In fact sometimes I think the less the better].

We have the privilege of some really well known people in the industry. I’m sure we’ll all benefit from their experience. Just to name a few folks, we have Brian Marick, Ron Jefferies, Chet Hendrickson, Jeff Patton, Paul Julius, William Wake, George Dinwiddie and many more. Certainly we have a really really passionate set of folks at the conference. Some great topics were suggested yesterday in the opening of the open spaces. More interesting topics to come up today. Watch out the conference schedule page for topics.

Watch out the conference wiki to see what come out.

Also if you want to be in the loop about future conference, you can join our mailing list on Google Group.