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

• Easy associative, serendipitous linking by using WikiWords (use a word with several capitals, and it becomes a link. If the corresponding page doesn't exist yet, you can click on the ? link that appears after the word to create it).
  
• Easier text formatting than plain html (e.g. by using a * to make a bullet).
  

• WikiLinks still work.
• Pasting to and from OpenOffice (or the other word processor) works without visible differences.
• I can see the images in the page while I am editing.
• Text layout changes are instant and wysiwig.
• I can still get at the html source if I want to, by clicking on the Source button (unfortunately still necessary, as most, but not all, formatting changes work from within the editor).
• I only needed to modify an edit template to get started, no modifications to the core wiki software were necessary.
• Look and feel, including keyboard combinations, is much like word processors, so the barrier for casual users to edit pages is much lowered.

As Dave Pollard wrote last week

Some audience members volunteered these reasons why people love playing
these games: (a) to become a member of an interesting group, (b) to meet
new like-minded people, © to find an outlet for stifled creativity,
(d) to step outside one’s normal personal identity and ‘try on’ a new
one, (e) to master a challenge, (f) to do things anonymously they
wouldn’t dare do in real life, (g) to establish a personal reputation
and hence increase self-esteem. How many of these things do business
collaborations allow employees to do, and how could collaborations start
offering more of these attractors?"

Traveling the XP Days, I find many of these qualities in the community, except for being anonymous. XP Days Benelux saw many new session presenters this year, people roleplaying (things they normally don’t do) during the balancing act, people writing during the freewriting workshop (even those who normally don’t get around to writing) and at the end of the conference participants were happy and hopefully more confident.

So I’ve experienced real organisations, like the xp days, can be as collaborative as virtual games. I’m looking forward to visiting xp days london next Monday and Tuesday :-).

On monday, I visited Karslruhe to attend XP day Germany . I made some pictures of balancing act, making sense of agile, and the scrum 59 minute game.

Balancing Act:

‘I don’t want to hear about it.’

’It’s all your fault.’

Making sense of agile:

‘Where does this event fit in the Cynefin model?’

Scrum 59 minutes game:

‘integrating is hard work…’

‘…and this a happy customer’s testimonial of Dans’ Doggy Daycare.’

All pictures

(updated, as I posted some broken links)

I’m in Karlsruhe, Germany right now, on the eve of XP Day Germany. Looking forward to another fun installment of Balancing Act – Simple Tools for Feedback, Communication and Courage together with Marc Evers (Nynke Fokma has called in sick, unfortunately).

I’ve just uploaded some XP Days benelux photo’s separated in Thursday and Friday . Enjoy!

Here are some samples, to liven up the blog visually: