Did you know how truly diverse the Agile India 2012 conference program committee is?

That’s right! We have over 100 members from 21 countries.

Folks, Agile India 2012 conference is live! What does that mean?

Early-bird registration has started in full swing.

Sponsorship detail are published for interested companies.

We are reviewing all the awesome proposals submitted by experts from around the world. We should have the program live by end of Nov.

Over the last 7 years, with the help of various passionate folks, I’ve organized 50+ conferences. (Agile India Conferences, Simple Design and Testing Conference, Agile Coach Camp and CodeChef TechTalks to name a few.)

Most of these conferences were small to medium scale conferences in the range of  50 to 375 delegates.

Why we never organized larger conferences? Was it because we were not capable of organizing them? Or was there something stopping us from doing so?

Personally I prefer organizing small scale conference over large scale conference for the following reasons:

• In my experience the quality of interaction and experience speakers & participants have is inversely proportional to the size of the conference.
• Cost to run the conference exponentially increases with size. As the size increases:
• we need a bigger venue, which does impose a significant cost.
• overall logistics becomes lot more complex. Need extra planning and coordination. Again increasing cost and making the overall plan less adaptive.
• the participant price has to be increased – which means, most participants won’t be able to self fund their registration. They’ll depend on their companies to sponsor them. This leads to many people who actually do get sponsored by their companies are the ones less inclined to learn at the conference. Which again impacts the overall quality experience of others participants.
• we become more dependent on the sponsors. The more we are dependent on sponsors, more their demands. Inevitably leading to compromising the conference. Sometimes sponsors want speaker slots (esp. keynotes) for sponsorship. Also they further complicate the logistics.
• Are less inclusive from smaller companies and individual’s point of view. Cost is one aspect, but also because there would be a larger number of participants from big companies, the interactions at the conference take a very different dynamics.
• Right from the beginning, large conference have a fear of not attracting enough delegate and sponsors. To mitigate that risk, most large conference programs are filled with Big names. Who mostly present the same old topics which have been beaten to death over a decade. We like it or not, the overall program tends to be more focused on basics (least common denominator) and seems to attract mostly beginners who are willing to pay that kind of money. Innovative and disruptive ideas are mostly neglected. Because they would really be disruptive for the audience.
• Because of the previous point, the real practitioners, doing really meaningful work, tend to shy away from such conferences. Again leading to poorer quality conference.
• Marketing and Branding effort: Large conferences need huge effort and funds to market and brand themselves. Smaller conferences are mostly marketing and branded through word of mouth and these days with social media.
• The effort and time it takes to organize one large, centrally located conference, in that much time, we could easily organizer 3-4 smaller, more local conferences. Smaller conferences surely reduce the costs for participants. Smaller conferences encourages more of a distributed, sustainable, local community.

I could spend rest of my sunday afternoon thinking about this and I’m sure I’ll come up with 10 more points against large conference. Having said that, large conference do have some clear advantages that smaller conference cannot achieve. the splash, the penetration, cross pollination, etc. etc.

However I think its clear, at least to me, why I prefer smaller conference.

It cool to have thought thru the issues and to have the points flushed out. But to avoid dogmatism, its always important to reevaluate your points every few years. Which is one of the reasons, I decided to help organize Agile India 2012 Conference.

As you might be aware the JIT Submissions are closed. We are very happy with the response we’ve got so far.

Totally we’ve received 231 submissions.

Following is the stage wise breakup of the proposals:

Following is the breakup according to the levels (very happy to see a large number of sessions in the practicing space):

Following is the breakup according to the session types: (again not surprised to see a large number of talks):

Lastly, the duration wise breakup of the sessions:

Also we’ve received 22 research papers from the following countries.
Selected papers will be published by IEEE Publications.

Also, we are happy to have totally 184 unique presenters (159 primary presenters and 38 secondary presenters.)

Currently we are reviewing all these proposals. You should see the final list by end of November.

Gentle reminder, the early bird submission for the Agile India 2012 Conference closes on 26th Sep 2011.

Visit our submission system to get started.

Some resources to help you with your submission:

• How to Submit a Proposal?
• Everything You Should Know about Submitting a World-Class Proposal
• Early Bird Submission: What’s the big rush?
• Overview of the Review Process
• Important Milestones
• Compensation for speakers

Update: Stage Proposals are closed.

Sessions proposals are open now; visit: http://submit2012india.agilealliance.org/proposals

Every now and then, I run into some weird issue with a software that I truly depend on. What I’m trying to do, looks like a very valid scenario, yet the software just does not want to cooperate. I look at their error message, it is completely misleading. You try to logically reason it out, but you run out of reasons.

Just when you are about to loose hope, you google for the error message and you find a huge number of other users offering solutions. Some problems might be very old know issues, but the folks building the software just never got around to fix them. However, with the help of suggestions from other users, you are able to very quickly solve your issue.

Instantaneously your frustration with the “poor quality” software disappears. You start to love the software even more.

This might sound dramatic, but this is my experience.

For Example: Recently I noticed that my blog, which runs on wordpress, did not have any description meta-tag.

Asked myself:

Shouldn’t wordpress produce a decent  description for each blog post? Guess not!

So I googled for it. Found an easy enough solution. Implemented it. Worked well, except, I started getting the following error on all admin pages:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at

It says its a Warning, but its a show-stopper. Does not even let me access the admin screens. However people can view my blog just fine.

Again googled for the error message and found a solution. Fixed it. Life is good.

This is the power of having a great community of users. User issues can be fixed in a fairly decentralized way.

Also we all know that “Zero-Defect-Product” is a myth. Any interactive system, can never be fully specified nor fully tested. There will always be scenarios that your team did not think about, but your users are trying to use the product in those scenarios.

So my point is:

Your software might have issues, but sometimes the community can figure out the solution and share it with others, faster than your company can. It does really compensate for not having the highest quality product.

In other words:

You can get away with slightly lower quality product if you are able to build a great community of users around your product.

Of course, if you have a crappy product that does not add any value to any users, then you won’t be able to build a community, no matter how great the quality of your product is.

Also I’ve seen many products that keep everything so closed/secretive, that even if a user wants to help, they simply cannot.

Personally I think those days are gone. This is the era of “more power to the users“ and “more dependence on the users“.

Agile gave us a wonderful head-start in a different direction than the one we’ve used to (heavy weight methods.) Personally I feel we’ve got as much value we could. Now its time to start thinking from a different direction, building on what we already know and to some extent unlearning some things we know.

Wait a second, isn’t Agile all about “Inspect and Adapt”?

There is a limit to “inspect and adapt”. If you look at the Lean movement, most people talk about Kaizen (small gradual change, change for the good, which is in-line with inspect-and-adapt). But very few people talk about Kaikaku (disruptive change or transformation).

Remember Agile was Kaikaku for most of us in late 90s. And then we’ve applied Kaizen to it for many years. IMHO now its time to apply Kaikaku again.

For the last 6+ years, few of us in India, are trying to establish a sustainable Agile community. The truth is that we are still struggling to have a self-sufficient, self-driven community.

We don’t seem to be hosting regular user group meetings. Our sporadic events seem to attract mostly new people each time. Next meeting we rarely see them. Huge number of people sign up, but only a fraction show up.

Its not just the Agile community, we’ve tried many other communities like .Net User Group, TechCamp, GeekNight, BarCamps, etc. Except the Linux community (FOSS now) I don’t think any other software community has really sustained itself.

This is very contrary to what I saw when I used to facilitate the Agile Philly User Group and the Philly GeekNight. People used to drive 2 hrs to attend the meeting. We had the same set of people coming every meeting. We all had this sense of learning and growing together.

What do you think is different in India?

IMHO the biggest problem I see is that there is so much “mediocre job opportunity” available, that frankly software professionals can be in demand for many years without learn anything new. With many people I sense a ”there-is-no-need-to-stretch-ourself” attitude. Necessity is the mother of innovation and action. People don’t see the necessity. Period.

There are very few people I know who care about learning and exploring and growing.

Some other problems I see:

• For most people, there is no end to mediocre opportunities and they are happy with it. “This job sucks, but its OK, I get a decent salary.” kind of attitude. The ones who want to purse big dreams mostly move to US or other places. (There are always exceptions to the rule.)
• With all the personal, social life & society obligations and working late to catch up with counterparts in other countries, there is very little time left for user groups and other initiatives. Even if one is interested, the traffic and other logistics make it next to impossible to motivate people.
• There is country culture, but the biggest culprit is the Organization culture. At certain places I’ve worked, if you are not learning new stuff, you feel like a piece of shit. But in many other companies I’ve visited, that’s not the case.
• Indian Software Industry is unfortunately very “brand conscious“. If its a big name speaking at an event, people will walk a whole day to attend the event. But if its a local speaker presenting, it doesn’t appeal.

I’m sorry if you find me ranting, but I’m disappointed with the attitude. I’ve almost lost hope, but may be you can show me the light.