Archive
Agile2010 moves to Orlando…
In response to the floods that ravaged Nashville, Tenn., the Agile2010 conference has been relocated to the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin hotel in Orlando, Florida. The conference dates will remain the same; scheduled for Aug. 9 – 13 (http://agile2010.agilealliance.org).
With the uncertainty of when the Nashville facilities could be restored we decided to relocate the Agile2010 conference. For details and answers to questions please click here.
Program Selection Schedule
- March 3rd – March 26th – Review Submissions and Choose Sessions
- March 29th – April 11th Notifications will be sent to all submitters. The sessions that have been selected the speakers must confirm that they will present the session at the conference when notified.
- April 12th – Program Session Selection completed
- Week of April 26 – Program Content will be scheduled with specific times and rooms
- May 3 – Program Published to web-site
If you have questions or concerns please do not hesitate to let me know.
Only 5 days left to submit!
That’s right the submission system will be closing this coming Friday, February 26th. There is still time to get your session proposed and reviewed for presentation at this year’s conference. The deadline will not be extended, please do not delay.
Note: Friday is also the last day to be able to edit your submissions based on feedback from comments and reviews.
Agile2010 Speaker Compensation Explained
I have received a number of emails and seen various comments, like the following:
- I don’t want to get stuck doing only a short talk, which doesn’t comp speakers enough
- 60/90 minute speaker compensation policy does not align incentives with desired behaviors
The following is the analysis we did with regard to the various sessions, the length of the session, etc.
60 Minute Session
- $250 Honorarium
- Thursday Night Hotel Stay – $169
- Conference Fee Waived – $1699 (I split the difference between Super Early Bird and General Registration)
The total value of presenting this session is $2118.
90 Minute Session
- $250 Honorarium
- 4 Hotel Nights – $676
- Conference Fee Waived – $1699 (I split the difference between Super Early Bird and General Registration)
The total value of presenting this session is $2625.
Conclusions
The difference between the 2 comps is just a little over $500 which is the addition of 3 hotel nights. In almost all of my discussions people seem to discount the conference fee and only focus on the hotel nights and say that the compensation does not provide the right incentive. In fact some of the discussion we had indicated that the 60 minute session was too highly compensated. It’s too late to change it for this year, I would be interested in getting people’s feedback for next year.
Submission System Deadline Extended!
The deadline for submitting proposals to the Agile 2010 conference has been extended until February 26th, 2010. All submissions received before that date will be read and receive feedback from the review committee for that stage, and submitters will have the chance to update their proposals based on that feedback. However, it is to your advantage to submit before the last minute this year. Stage Producers may begin selecting proposals for inclusion in the conference starting February 19th, so you are encouraged to submit before the 19th.
Agile 2010 Call for Submissions
Agile 2010 is the leading international conference on agile methods in software development. Agile 2010 will be held in Nashville, USA. The conference brings together many disciplines in the fields of information systems and software development and bridges communities that rarely get a chance to exchange ideas and thoughts.
The conference will examine the latest theory, practical applications, and implications of agile methods. The agile approach focuses on delivering business value early in the project lifetime and being able to incorporate emergent requirements. The conference is not about a single methodology or approach, but rather provides a forum for the exchange of information regarding all agile development technologies.
Submission Process
The Agile 2010 submission process will be somewhat different from past years. In the past submissions would be submitted to individual stages for consideration. This year you will be submitting to one of the broad conference themes, Business, Technical, and Leadership & Organization. Once submitted the program committee will identify and forward to the most appropriate stage.
The length of the sessions will either be 60 or 90 minutes and will be presented Tuesday – Thursday ONLY.
Note: Each presenter can submit 3 proposals in total. This includes proposals where the presenter is not the 1st speaker.
Important Dates
The submission system will be open on January 11, 2010 and will remain open until February 19, 2010.
We will be providing further refinement of the call for submissions throughout the week. For more information in the interim or to submit a session click here.
Invited Sessions – Did I read that correctly?
As I have mentioned before the theme for this year’s agile conference is Learn. Practice. Explore… This is more than just a tag-line. It is the clear intent of the Program Committee to have sessions that vary in experience level. Having this desire leads to a quandary with regard to relying entirely on the submission system process to yield the right balance of sessions. Therefore, we made a decision to break a bit with tradition and invite specific sessions. The sessions that we choose to invite were the 180 minute sessions. These sessions are clearly the longest and require the greatest amount of preparation.
How will the committee choose the sessions? This is a fair question, here is the criteria in priority order:
- The session content fills a specific hole in the program, either from a pure content perspective or from an experience level.
- The session provides a fresh perspective on a particular topic.
- The presenter scored in the top 20% with regard to feedback at last year’s conference
My recommendation in general is to submit your session into the normal submission process. You will be limited to selecting a time of 60 or 90 minutes. As the program committee evaluates the sessions we may get back to you to see if a particular session can be expanded.
Inviting sessions immediately brings to mind questions about fairness. Are the invited speakers friends of the program committee, etc. This I can state without question is not the criteria for selecting invited sessions. In order to make it very clear the following people will not be invited speakers at the conference due to potential conflicts of interest.
- Conference Chair – who would want me to speak for 180 minutes anyways
- Program Committee – Pollyanna Pixton, Brian Button, and Lowell Lindstrom
- Agile Alliance Board Members – Please see the Agile Alliance web-site for the complete list.
As you can see a number of these people would be on a short list to invite and in fact would qualify based on the criteria listed above. All of these people are welcome to submit sessions into the normal submission system.
Click here to contact me directly if you have questions or comments.
Agile 2010 Program Committee
As I mentioned in the previous post the Agile 2010 program for the conference is organized around 3 collaborating communities, Business, Leadership & Organization, and Technical. To provide a clear focus for each area I have expanded the role of program chair for Agile 2010 to be a program committee. The following outstanding individuals have agreed to lead a specific area of the program for Agile 2010.
Business – Lowell Lindstrom
Lowell Lindstrom has been involved in developing and deploying software products for over nearly 25 years. He was among the early pioneers in bringing agile software development services to the marketplace. In 1999, as Vice President at Object Mentor, he developed partnerships with the leaders of the Extreme Programming movement, including Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, and Martin Fowler to develop the ultimate agile learning experience. He was the Organizing Chair of the first North American conference on agile software development (XP/Agile Universe) in 2001 and the Program Chair in 2004, where he was instrumental in unifying the two agile conferences.
Lowell developed the first commercially available course on the business side of agile software development. He is a co-founder and former Director of the Agile Project Leadership Network (www.apln.org). In late 2005, Lowell founded The Oobeya Group, which helps organizations successfully spread the successful use of agile techniques to all teams and functional areas. He is published in the Cutter IT Journal, the Auerbach IS Management Handbook (8th ed.), and various conference proceedings. He is a Certified ScrumMaster, Practitioner, and Trainer.
Leadership & Organization – Pollyanna Pixton
An international collaborative leadership expert, Pollyanna Pixton developed the models for collaboration and collaborative leadership through her thirty-eight years of working inside and consulting with corporations and organizations. She helps companies create workplaces where talent and innovation are unleashed—making them more productive, efficient, and profitable.
Pollyanna is a founding partner of Accelinnova, president of Evolutionary Systems, and director of the Institute for Collaborative Leadership. She speaks and writes on topics of creating cultures of trust, leading collaboration, and business ethics. Her models are found in the book she co-authored, Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility, (Addison Wesley Professional, July 2009).
She has been involved with the Agile Conferences, serving on the organizing committee for the first one-day conference in Salt Lake City. At the first four day conference, Pollyanna helped with the marketing and organized the ice breaker and the DJ for the closing dinner. In 2004, she chaired the Executive Summit and in 2005, chaired the APLN Leadership Summit in Minneapolis. She contributed and held sessions in 2006 and 2007. In 2008 she was the assistant chair for the Leadership Stage and in 2009 was the Chair of the Leadership Stage. For 2007-2009 she has managed the media sponsorships for the conference.
She co-founded the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) and chaired Leadership Summits in London, Minneapolis, Richmond, Las Vegas, Orlando, and Dallas.
Technical – Brian Button
Brian Button is the VP of Engineering and Director of Agile Methods at Asynchrony Solutions, Inc., in St. Louis, MO, where he is responsible for training and mentoring both internal and external project teams in all things agile. Brian has been the Tutorial Chair for 3 XP/Agile Universe conferences, the leading voice for agile adoption in St. Louis since 2000, and is the founder of the St. Louis Extreme Programming Users Group. Before joining Asynchrony, Brian was a developer in the Microsoft‘s patterns & practices group, developing several application blocks and software factories. He also speaks at user groups and conferences about agile methods, test driven development, and other topics.
Agile 2010 Program – 3 Collaborating Communities
The Agile 2010 Program will be organized around three collaborating communities: Technical, Business, and Leadership & Organization.
At the end of the day, you have to deliver. The Technical portion of the program focuses on topics and activities that help agile team members deliver value through the things that they create. Be it programmers, testers, designers, and others who build software, this community will provide participants a range of sessions on how to do this better.
Stakeholders are constantly demanding more, faster and at less cost. The Business portion of the programs focuses on topics that help those who leverage the capabilities of agile teams to make their organizations thrive. Product Managers, Analysts, Business Partner and others business leaders can rapidly deliver new valuable products and solution to their stakeholders using agile. This community will present and explore practices and approaches to understand what’s valuable and how to interact with agile teams to make visions come into reality.
Let’s face it, agile is not easy, whether you are just starting or even when you are good at it. The Leadership & Organization portion of the program focuses on leaderships topics that are essential to continually thrive in the presence of complexity and change. Whether you are leading as part of the agile team, with stakeholders, or leading cultural change across an organization, this community will provide a range of sessions, challenging your view of work while providing tools and practices to more effectively lead to better results.
Learn. Practice. Explore…
When the Agile Alliance offered me the task of conference chair earlier this year I was excited about this great opportunity. For many years I have been speaking, attending, and assisting in the selection of the program. Now I was going to get to lead the conference. One of the key things that I pitched to the committee during the selection process was more content for experienced practitioners. This leads me back to the title of this post. The metaphor for this year’s conference describes stages of learning. For those of you who are familiar with the Japanese martial arts this is referred to as Shu Ha Ri. These stages describe a path from learning to mastery. It is my goal and the goal of the Program Committee that the program that we put together for Agile 2010 will provide something compelling for each stage of learning.
In the coming weeks I will be providing more information about the conference, the program committee and ways for people to get involved in the conference. You can also follow us on twitter @agile2010.
If you have questions or would like to get involved please contact Jim Newkirk at chair2010@agilealliance.org.
Agile 2010's Blog 