One of the concerns that came up, was with agile becoming mainstream, there will be a surge in 'true believers' who take a bunch of practices from a book (e.g. extreme programming explained or the scrum book) and take it as 'the thing' rather than as a gate to further understanding - turning off sceptics through their zeal.

If you want to read more about this, check out the xp mailinglist archives a few years back, or read about Shu Ha Ri on the c2 wiki or in Alistair Cockburn's book on agile software development. I believe it is good to start out with practices, try them out a hundred percent and then reflect and make them your own.

By drawing in more beginners we, as a community, can support our industry in making a smooth transition towards more effective and enjoyable work. I interviewed a bunch of people recently for the agile2005 experience reports and yesterday at the agile seminar, and one thing that most of them had in common was how much difference they experienced in their working environment after starting with simple practices like stand-up meetings and iteration planning. An older engineering manager told me, that now he saw his engineers have so much fun he would almost consider going back into engineering. Now is a great time to be working in software development.

Ok, so here is my candidate statement, within acceptance tests provided by Diana Larsen : max 150 words, has to contain something about non-profit and community experience and what I would like to do for the agile alliance.

Hi, my name is Willem van den Ende. I'd like to help build agile alliance branding strength by fostering thriving local communities, international conferences, a website and other expressions that model our values.

I work as software development coach, currently based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. I enjoy growing communities, so I co-founded xpnl, xp day benelux, agile open, agile systems and systemsthinking.net. Growing up in a tiny country that cultivated its golden age by accepting diversity when that was outlawed elsewhere, makes me realize how big this world is - we can prosper only by learning from each other.

As agile becomes mainstream, I believe we need to emphasize values over practices and individual methodologies. I see the agile alliance as rallying point for pragmatists seeking like minds advancing the "State of The Practice" in management and software development. We'll be the change we wish to create.

I'm articulating the ideas I've already got so far in a 150 word blurb for a mailing to the members. That is due tomorrow, so If you reach me before then, I'll be able to weave it in there as well.

For your and my linking pleasure, here are summaries by Michele Marchesi, Bill Wake and Keith Ray.

I used to recommend the first edition as the quickest way to get started with extreme programming. Currently, as 'getting started hands on guide' for beginners I'd recomment the Scrum book (for iterative planning) together with Test Driven Development by Kent Beck for programming.

I'd recommend the second edition for those who are interested in the pragmatics behind extreme programming. It now feels less action oriented, but compensates that with a much better explanation of the reasoning behind the practices.

Worthwile reading if you've been doing (some of) the practices for a while, and start wondering why they work. Over the past years, I've found it worthwile systems thinking about this with some colleagues. XP Explained second edition can help you get there a bit faster.

One idea that comes to mind borrows from the experience of the computer hardware industry, and relates to aggregation concepts. If one can combine commodity components to create a new product that is both useful and affordable (i.e. high-value) then commoditization becomes an enabling force, an opportunity, if you will, to provide something that was not feasible to provide before. Using this analogy, how might this concept of commodity aggregation apply to IT services?

What I get from the roundtable is: If you're competing on price alone, it is because you are not differentiated enough.

apt-cache search

Once the first page worked in a test directory, I wondered how to convert my old site to the new. I did not want to destroy my existing site, but do a piecemeal transition. That's a case of eating my own dogfood - when moving to a new content management system, I advocate changing over one part of an existing site at a time.

Making sure the pages still looked the same was a bit painful though. I didn't start the next story on the list put pages through html tidyyet. With this story, only pages conforming to html specification can be generated.

Maybe I should have - preventing errors downstream, before pages go public would have saved me time. Now I had the homepage and other pages close to it done well, only I didn't remove enough of the table layout from the new partial pages (remember, previously every page contained all html, now part of it comes from website2go). So, some pages missed table cells, or had one too many, so their layout was out of whack. The html tidy story could have prevented this.

Manually converting the pages was not so pleasant work, but there weren't that many either, and I only have to do it once. I'll write more on making the tidy story later, as that proved a bit more difficult than I hoped it would be.

Subversion support is planned for wiki2go, and I hope to feed what I learn from making website2go in to wiki2go. Pascal told me the next version of wiki2go will have support for multiple layouts in one site, as well as plugins and ruby code within pages, so both layout and content generation are very flexible. A few differences to what I need for my site and sites like it remain, I guess we'll have to see how we could fit it in wiki2go:

• the site works as static html only (so no need to run a cgi or webrick server)
• the site has a hierarchical nature
• easy to mix html pages with other content (e.g. images and pdf files), and keep the html together with the other files.
• recently published (instead of recent changes - if I spellcheck a page or fix a link, I do not necessarily want the rss feed updated)

In a previous life, while developing the i-tor content management system, we got a serious headache from trying to build-in our own flavour of version management. Eventually, versioning didn't make it. After a disaster, where a colleague accidentally deleted a lot of my writing, and we were unable to recover it, I'm absolutely convinced versioning is a must, even if it is to only provide a linear undo. I'm not in the habit of losing data, and I'm not going to adopt it :-)