12 November 07 - 14:13Breaking Acts at Agile 2008

Preparations are starting for Agile 2008. And you can help. The short story is that we're looking for speakers; we'd also like to solicit reviewers. Read on for the details.

In the run-up to Agile 2007 I shared with Elisabeth Hendrickson the post of Tutorials Chair. This means we were responsible for one specific type of session, irrespective of topic: tutorials, which are meant to convey "mainstream agile" content and attract the more polished speakers. We struggled with the scale of the conference - 1200 attendees in 2007 and 1600 expected next year. The number of submissions was quite large - about 600 all told, about 200 in tutorials alone. In reviews we found it hard to give all tutorial submissions, covering as broad a range of topics as they did, the attention each deserved.

Rachel Davies is chairing the 2008 conference. She came up with a metaphor to guide the design of the conference - one that has the advantage of framing this big conference as a cluster of smaller conferences, with the team in charge of each smaller conference free to focus on a topic of interest to them. So, Agile 2008 is organized along the lines of a "music festival", with various Stages; each Stage has a theme and a Producer who tries to put together a great agile conference around that theme. I think it's pretty nifty. Since it's new, there will inevitably be some few hiccups as we get used to it, but I am optimistic it can help reduce the "big conference blues" we experienced in the past two years. There's a stage dedicated to Agile curmudgeons, for instance - I'm thrilled that we're having that. There's one on examples, one on the user experience, one on customers and business value, and so on.

I'm happy to announce that I will be producer for the "Breaking Acts" stage. Quoting from the CFP: "Agile as it stands today is still a work in progress. For Agile software development to remain relevant, it must incorporate new ideas continuously. This stage is for speakers who bring a fresh and surprising look to aspects of Agile we thought familiar, and speakers interested in ideas that are relevant to Agile but not accepted yet as 'mainstream'. First-time speakers are particularly welcome."

If this kind of thing rocks your boat, I would appreciate your helping in one of two ways. Right now, if you'd like to be a reviewer for session proposals, please get in touch with me; I'll give you a quick overview of what to expect and what's expected of you. In a few weeks, if you're interested in speaking at the conference, we'll be opening up our (new) submission system to session submissions. I'll post the details here (if I remember; otherwise, they'll also be on the conference site).

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