• Why am I stuck?
• How does it work? Why?
• Does the work I'm doing now bring the project forward?
  
• Should I inform someone about problems...?"

For a bigger look back, Keith Ray collected links to Pascal van Cauwenberghe's things I didn't learn series.

So the next time a manager tells us e.g. “Yes we should do that, but we haven’t got the right people / enough resources / ... to succeed.” we should test him by asking “And what are you going to do about that?”.

I particularly resonated with the tale he tells in the beginning, about how writing classes in school almost killed his desire to write. It almost did that for me too. Working from an outline doesn’t work for me. I usually wrote my essays the night before, when I was angry enough to start writing. Afterwards my MSc thesis almost did it. I find it hard to write where my energy is not.
But apparently, something draws me towards writing of some sort, even though lately it’s been limited to blog entries, e-mails and instant messages.

I said “I’m reading”, in the first paragraph, because I got somewhat stuck on the first exercise, which is deceptively simple…
It is a test to measure the time it takes for you to start writing down a fieldstone.

I’m Sorry, did I break your concentration?

I thought,

how hard could it be. I’m in my office, I’ve got pens, paper, computer.

I failed this test. It took me longer than five seconds to start writing something down. The five second test showed me I had no index cards present, couldn’t find a pen and it took me much more than five seconds to open firefox, navigate to my wiki (there’s a bookmark in thet toolbar but I don’t see it, apparently), and find a suitable page or make a new one.

Clearly I wasn’t ready to start applying this method…

After this test, I’ve changed a couple of things in my environment. I made sure there was a fresh stack of index cards and some pens beside my bed (The title and introduction of this entry originated there). And I finally got around to make the gnome-blog applet on my computers’ desktop functional. I need something I could just post to, and worry about organizing it later. The wiki is great for writing articles-to-be and relating them, as well as for collecting systems-administration stuff I figured out eventually. Finding a new page in the wiki when I have an interesting link or something pops up is sometimes enough to break my concentration;
I noticed I miss a lot of the interesting links and stuff that come up during chat sessions.

I took a first step. Make it easier to collect fieldstones. The next step would be doing something to organize the fieldstones after I’ve added them. I can search them already, which is good. Now I would like to have something to organize and relate them too.

If you have an interest in writing, want to try another style, or find your fun back doing it, I find Weinberg on Writing worth checking out.

Having enjoyed the first one a lot last year, we (Marc Evers, Vera Peeters, Pascal van Cauwenberghe, Nynke Fokma, Rob Westgeest and yours truly) decided to organise another Agile Open.

Agile Open is an unconference aka Peer Conference , where the sessions and programme are made by the pariticipants.

We scouted for another location, but ended up choosing the Elewijt Center in Mechelen again – there is something very comfortable about a well organised conference facility, where people know who you are. As I noticed last friday when we went there for a meeting. Nynke and I arrived a bit late, and before we could ask for directions we were greeted at the desk – “Ah, I was wondering if you were going to turn up today. Vera Is over there in the Lobby, next to the paintings”. I find the “Cheers factor” very important-

you wanna go where people know,
people are all the same-
you wanna go where everybody knows your name

I want a conference to have the Cheers factor (the SPA conference is where I found that first) . If the location has it already, that makes it even better.

So, I hope you wanna go to Agile Open. Space is limited to 40 people, so we can know each others’ names :-). If so, I’ll see you at April 27 and 28 in Mechelen, Belgium.

The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and
vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone
who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see
this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a
big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation
going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding
from their ears, they would get so mad.

So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an
enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion.

I had a good laugh about the waterfall 2006 conference conference yesterday. Stalwart Analysis: Especially The Effluvia of Determined Thought by Don Sengroiux made me remember the good old bad days at comp.object (read the names in the paper closesly :-) ). Have fun.