Agile 2008

I thought I should write a quick note to say how excited I am about the 'stage' concept at Agile 2008.

"Agile 2008 has adopted the metaphor of a music festival that provides multiple stages to attract audiences with common interests. The stages within our program are designed and organized by experts (acting as stage producers) who are truly passionate about their particular areas. Each stage will have a feel of a smaller, focused mini-conference whilst providing the conference attendee with a wide choice of stages to choose from."

I will be helping out with some small aspects of Brian Marick's Designing, Testing, and Thinking with Examples Stage. This particularly appealed to me after my experiences with teaching, and fits well with the model used at the Sussex Creativity Zone (CETL).

"...it won’t merely accept the need for examples, it will glory in them as one of the primary ways we learn, teach, communicate, test, design, code, and decide how to act in the world. The stage is therefore open to any kind of session that puts the concrete example front and center."
and
"We encourage risky sessions. If your session has a chance to succeed spectacularly, we won’t mind that it might fail disastrously. The success of the stage will be more about how high the peaks were than what the average session ratings were."

I am rather excited to see how well pushing for concrete examples, as the logical step beyond experience reports, works in practice.

I don't know yet whether or not I can attend, but I really hope so.