As the year is running to an end (I was quietly hoping for it to crawl, but it’s defininetely running), there’s new events to announce.

In case you’ve missed these announcements from Marko ’s weblog:

• XPNL new years drinks , January 3d, King Arthur Cafe, Utrecht, The Netherlands
• Agile Open 2006 on April 27 and 28 (Thursday and Friday) Mechelen, Belgium.

The new years’ drinks are extremely self organised, Agile Open a bit less, as a two day conference takes a bit more preparation. We have yet to refactor the agile open wiki, we hope to do that later this week. The wiki has been temporarily closed to the public due to spam attacks. This year, we’re aiming to keep Agile Open as cosy as last year.

Discussion about a possible theme and to theme or not to theme agile open are still ongoing.

One thing is certain, we’re not going to have a keynote speaker, as the participants will have to make the program themselves, like last year. So I hope you consider visiting agile open, run a session, or post a question, even if you don’t know how to run a session (‘If you can’t afford to run a session, a facilitator will be provided for you’ ;-) ).

while true; do nice ruby all.rb ; done

A customer passes by

screaming

Storycards rustle on the wall

(inspired by Daily Scrum Haiku posted by Simon Baker ).

So, finally, here are my pictures from XP Days London last week. There’s quite a bunch, this time they are grouped by session. I’ll select one from each as a taster.

`Five People in a cab

staring at red lights

A haiku on the table`

Pictures from the eXtreme Tuesday Club

`Lego is so cool`

Pictures from the agile architecture workshop

`Subverting metrics is fun`

dark Pictures from the Do you get what you measure? workshop

`The map is not the terrain`

`it really isn’t`

Dead fish, and other miscellaneous pictures

I found a blog entry by Cedric Girard in French, about xp days Benelux. It’s cool. I hope you can read french, because some of his appreciations are untranslatable.

Cedric writes about how he found the values of Communication, Simplicity and Courage in the way the conference participants gave one-minute presentations on sessions they attended, at the end of the conference. Honest, direct and simple, as he puts it.

We had scheduled one-minute presentations by session organisers on both mornings (Cedric uses the word ‘conferencier’, which means comedian in dutch – several of the presentations were hilarious). The intention was to give participants a more accurate feel for the sessions than a piece of paper or a title can possibly give.

Then, at the bar on Thursday, someone suggested to Vera participants do the same. We decided (courage!) to give it a try. The one minute presentations by participants were as funny as those by presenters, and we got a feel for those sessions we wished we’d attended.

I’m curious who suggested it by the way, as the suggesters’ identity has disappeared in the fog of excellent conversation and drinks apparently ;-).

I measure a decent conference program by the difficulty one has to choose a session – in each timeslot there should be at least two sessions that you really want to attend. Judging from the participants’ presentations and the reactions to them, we succeeded :-).

In “the previous entry”, I was complaining that I couldn’t find a paper or photo’s of the drift table. Simon Baker informs me this blog entry by Andy Pols has some photo’s of the drift table.

Andy also provides a reference to a paper that is readily downloadable: The drift table, designing for ludic engagement .

Images courtesy of www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/equator/steve_drift_table.html

And, like Andy, I want one!

Well, XP Days London was Fun again. I’ve had a peek at the many photos I took, I’ll publish them later this week, as Rob and I are currently busy preparing the next eXperience Agile course.

In the meantime, I recommend what some other writings on sessions I went to.

• Marko van der Puil on our Temperature Reading Session
• Simon Baker and Pascal van Cauwenberghe on I’m not a bottleneck.

I normally have a funny feeling with keynote sessions. I’ve become so accustomed to interactive sessions, that I find sitting for an hour at a time, watching the slides go by to be a bit boring. Unless the presentation is really engaging. William Gaver ‘s presentation on Ludic Design was such a presentation. Unfortunately, I can’t find the videos he used (made by a documentary filmmaker) online. These videos showed very effectively how the drift table (a coffee table with a lense in the middle that lets you drift over the english country side as if you were in a hot air balloon) and another device were used in different ways than the designers anticipated.

It resonates with something I’ve observed from practice quite a bit – people will use your system in ways you’ve never expected. I prefer to be creative with it, and see what we can learn. Others seem to prefer saying `Bad User! This is not the way the system was intended!`…

rant
(Unfortunately, the papers on the drift table (probably written on British taxpayers’ money) seem to be locked behind ACM’s Portal, you have to be a member to access it… Don’t you just love how academic publishing works… ).
/rant