Namaste!

I’m pleased to invite you to

Pushing the Boundaries while Keeping Agile Simple

What’s New? What’s Missing? What’s too Complex? What’s Obsolete?

Washtenaw Community College

Ann Arbor, Michigan

May 30 - June 1, 2008

The art of coaching teams toward excellence and productivity is tricky business. Daily we make recommendations in increasingly complex contexts… and too often, as coaches, we work in isolation from other coaches. This is our opportunity to share stories and practices and to wrestle with the direction in which this discipline is going, or should go. (Read more about the RationaleBehindThisConference).

Growing a Community of Practice

Agile Coach Camp is about creating a network of practitioners who are striving to push the limits in guiding software development teams, while staying true to the values and principles at the core of the Agile movement. We’ve invited practitioners who, like you, are passionate about their work, active in the field and willing to share what they’ve learned.

Do you have a technique or practice worth sharing with your peers? Or an idea you’d like to test out with some leaders in the community? Are you facing challenges and want to get some perspective from other practitioners, or hear how they do things? If you feel you’d benefit from connecting with 80-100 ScrumMasters?, XP Coaches, Trainers, Change Agents and Mentors to talk, draw, argue and explore ideas, then this conference is for you.

You can learn all about AgileCoachCamp on this wiki.

What’s the Agenda?

Agile Coach Camp is a practitioner-run conference for peer-to-peer learning and exploration. It’s your conference, so there will be no agenda until you arrive! We will create it collaboratively. If you prefer a conference where you can sit and listen to expert lectures, this isn’t it. As at BarCamp, so at AgileCoachCamp there are no speakers, only participants.

We use the OpenSpace meeting format, which means you, the participant, determine the topics and questions that you want to talk about. We’ll create our agenda Saturday morning and people will then join the small group discussions that interest them. Open Space is very complimentary to Agile & Lean thought processes, and actually shares some of the same principles. Open Space is all about self-organizing and empowered teams. Open Space will allow YOU and other participants to bring to the conference the issues and opportunities that are emerging for you in real time. For some of you this will also be an opportunity to gain experience with Open Space, yet another effective tool for your toolkit, for cultivating communities of practice in your region.

You don’t have to be an expert to propose a topic or ask a question at AgileCoachCamp. You are simply inviting people into a conversation with you - other people who are also passionate about your topic or question. These conversations can build knowledge, and often lead to future collaborations; Open Space is great for networking! It has the feel of a good coffee break, where people are free to come and go from conversations as they please, yet it has a structure that helps you to know what conversations are happening so that you can join up with people interested in the same things as you.

What will the conference look like?

Friday evening is set aside for participants to connect with each other and build some food for thought. Those who wish to can participate in LightningTalks to get the ideas flowing, where you’ll have up to three minutes to share what’s on your mind. We’ve found this to be a great way to prime the pump for Open Space the following day. You get a quick glimpse of what people are thinking, it’s a great way to stimulate ideas. Your Lightning Talk can be based on your Position Paper or on any other idea or question you have. A space will also be provided for those who choose to simply relax with refreshments and reconnect with colleagues.

Saturday morning we’ll start with Opening the Space, at which time we’ll create our agenda, followed by participant-organized sessions till Sunday afternoon, at which time we’ll officially Close the Space, though we hope people who don’t have to leave early will hang around to continue discussions or even to plan for future collaborations they have cooked up!

Cost and registration

The conference is free and non-profit, run by volunteers. Attendance is open to all, though we are asking for Position Papers to encourage participants to be ready to contribute when they arrive. We’ll provide all meals, accommodation discounts, conference t-shirts and other goodies.

To register, please send your PositionPapers to proposals@agilecoachcamp.org. Remember that registration is limited to 100 people!

We look forward to seeing you in beautiful Ann Arbor this spring!

Sincerely,
Your Conference Organizers
info@agilecoachcamp.org

PS: Please help us promote this event by forwarding this email or blogging about it! Put a badge on your website, or print out a poster or some cards, or post this invitation on your favorite mailing list.

and P.S: Sponsorship

AgileCoachCamp is a community driven, non-profit conference. To make this happen we need support from organizations and individuals with an interest in fostering this community. One way to support the event is to sponsor something from the SponsorshipList. We do not have different levels of sponsorship, instead we have listed specific articles that need sponsoring on our wiki. You will find the email address there that lets you offer your help as a sponsor.

Note that sponsors’ Agile practitioners are welcome to submit Position Papers and attend as participants.

If you would like to forward this to your friends, boss, colleagues, etc you can download a PDF version of Agile Coach Camp Invitation.

Starting Monday Jan 28th 2008 I’ll be based out of Mumbai. (I’ll have a Mumbai based cell phone.) Lots of people are amazed that I moved to Mumbai from Bangalore. Bangalore is the silicon valley of India. I’ve lived in Bangalore most of my life. But now I’ll be in Mumbai, my birth place.

Last 2 weeks have been crazy. I think next week will continue to be crazy. I saw 48 apartments before I decided to rent out the apartment I’ll be living in. This is my second stay in Mumbai. By now some of the agents know my taste. Last time I lived in Mumbai I had seen 102 apartments.

Real estate in Mumbai is sky rocketing. 2.5 years back I was paying 15,000 Rs rent. This time I’ll be paying 28,000 Rs rent. Its crazy.

Drop me a line if you are around Mumbai, I would be happy to hook up with you. If you are looking for accommodation and want to experience a home stay, you are most welcome to stay with my family!

I would like to share my experience of how I stared blogging. If you are not a blogger and feel a little left out from the elite blogging community, this might help you get started.

4 years back, while I was still at ThoughtWorks, there was a growing blogging community inside ThoughtWorks. There was a general feeling that you are not “kewl” if you don’t have a blog. I had ideas about software development and adventure sports that I wanted to share with others. So I wanted to blog and belong to the growing blogging community inside ThoughtWorks. But I was not motivated enough to blog regularly and I was probably not too disciplined to blog as well. I also had (and still have) a very big complex that my written communication sucks. This actually turned out to be a good motivation to start blogging. As a way to improve my written communication skills. Also I’m not good at reading, so I thought if I start a blog, at least that will force me to read other people’s blogs and write my own views.

So I found some motivations to blog. But what I was looking for, was a good topic that I could blog on. Esp. something that had continuity. That would make it easy for me to blog regularly. Finding new, different topics to blog about could be difficult to start off with. Luckily for me, we had just started an internal object boot camp at ThoughtWorks Bangalore office. There were lots of interesting things I was learning during the boot camp. Things like Getters and Setters break encapsulation. Such powerful thoughts! I wanted a way to capture this learning and share this with others. Also I want to record them to retrospect at the end of boot camp what I learned. So I found a topic to start blogging about.

Once I was motivated enough to blog and I had a topic that had a continuity, I wanted to figure out a place to blog. Most people don’t have their personal servers. At least, I did not have one then. So I asked a few people which is the simplest, free blogging site. JRoller and Blogspot were the famous free blogging sites then. I choose to go with JRoller. Was very happy with its services for a while.

After about 3 years I had got very regular blogging. I was surprised people actually read my blogs. Some people I met at conferences, knew me coz of my blog. I even got offers to advertise on my blog. By now there were so many blogs on JRoller, that it had become very slow. At that point I decided to get my own server and host my own blog. WordPress seems to be the favorite tool and I went with it. Very happy with the performance so far.

In retrospect I think there are 3 main ingredients to starting blogging:

• Motivation: Strong enough reasons to start blogging
• Topic: A topic that is modular and has continuity. A topic that matters to you. If you are learning a new technology or you are starting on a new project, it would be easy to blog about that.
• Tools: Some free blog hosting sites and easy tools to manage your blogs

Hope this helps!