The dust has settled, but we're still buzzing from the Agile Barcamp in Wellington on 7 December. This was a contributor-organised all-day conference held in the gorgeous office space at the top of the Deloitte building in the CBD. At the previous E-government Barcamp one of the recurring topics was agile development and project management methods. Some of us who attended thought it would be a good idea to organise another barcamp focused on agile so we could more deeply explore some topics that were hinted at during the e-govt barcamp.
Some attributes of a barcamp are that it's not commercial (there were some generous sponsors who covered costs of food and t-shirts but attendance was free) nor polished in a traditional conference sense, and that it relies heavily on interaction betweent the presenters and attendees. There is no schedule of talks until the day of the event when people who want to speak put a yellow sticky up on a big sheet of paper, indicating where, when, and what they want to talk about. Sounds like it won't work, right? It actually works surprisingly well. It also gives people who roll up on the day a chance to present. That's a key point.
We ended up with about double the attendance that we anticipated. Many of the sessions were standing-room only (four simultaneous "tracks" of sessions throughout the day) . Attendees were from a variety of organisations; there were people from government, small companies, big companies, and what was really cool was that the stick-on nametags only had room for people to write their first names. No room to write your company name! Cool. You had to talk to people to find out where they worked. And often, you never did find out because people were talking about things they were interested in, as opposed to necessarily putting on the corporate identity and being a mouthpiece. It was great to just talk about industry stuff without feeling like you're at some kind of company pimp-fest.
All in all a great day. I know I learned a lot about how people are dealing with software projects in an agile manner. One thing we learned was that many of the attendees were hungry for deeper insight, case studies, and experiences. It turns out there's quite a bit more experience with agile in Wellington that we thought! That's a very good thing.
Can't wait to kick up some more dust next year.