Agile Open Northwest, an alliance of agile practitioners in the US Pacific Northwest region, invite you to our 3rd annual conference Agile Open Northwest 2009 "Agile for Real".

The Northwest has a wealth of practitioners with years of real-world experience with agile methods and self-organizing teams. Agile Open Northwest offers an opportunity to strengthen our community of practice and co-create the future for agile development in our region.

Your hosts designed this event to allow practitioners like you to meet in self-organizing groups where we can share our latest ideas, challenges, hopes, experiences and experiments.

The Transition Initiative in Portland invites you to meet with us to begin planning and organizing an effort to build community resilience in the face of climate change, rising energy costs and economic decline.  Building on work started by many organizations, we will put into action energy descent planning around a variety of aspects; neighborhood organizing; coalition building with partner groups; and a holistic vision of how we can cope with major changes in our lives.  In the process we will create stronger communities and more satisfying lives based on sharing and cooperation. 

You’re welcome to come whether you are already committed or just curious about the possibilities.   If you’re working with a neighborhood or a group with a related mission, we invite you to come and explore how different groups and communities can network and link together in a shared effort to build a lower-carbon future.  Also, we urge you to circulate this notice to your group and anyone else you think should be there. 

Here’s the program: 

• Keynote speaker Friday evening, September 25, 7:30 pm.  Karen Lanphear s a co-founder of the Sandpoint Transition Initiative in Idaho.  She believes that within each community there lies an enormous pool of power that can be unleashed when people start working together on a common vision, and that education and building strong community coalitions can change the world.  Her presentation will include what is unique about the Transition model, Sandpoint’s experience in developing it, and their main challenges and how they came up with solutions.  Karen’s talk will be followed by a social in the church dining hall downstairs.  $10 donation, no one turned away.

• How Can We Build a Resilient Portland?  An Open Space Day, Saturday, September 26, 9:00-5:00.  Bring your ideas, passions and enthusiasm and participate in designing the movement – suggesting what is needed and discussing how to make it happen.  This powerful process will enable us to walk out at the end of the day with a road map for creating our future.  Coffee, tea and snacks will be available.  Lunch will be brown bag or at nearby cafes.  No charge for the day but donations appreciated.  

What we choose to focus on is up to you.  The Open Space format enables the people who come to create the agenda.  Anyone can suggest a topic to discuss on Saturday based on the theme of creating resilience.  If people choose to show up and discuss that topic, and to create an action team, it will become a part of the overall project. Some examples of projects that have emerged in other Transition Towns are  

• Food
• Transportation
• Housing
• Health and wellbeing
• Arts and Music
• ReSkilling - (re)learning the low tech skills of our forebears
• Neighborhood organizing and support
• Outreach and publicity
• Heart and soul - learning and helping others to cope with the psychological, spiritual and social sides of change
• Local currency
• Working with local government
• Administrative tasks such as Training and Finances 

Later Saturday you will have a chance to sign on for any projects you have energy for and begin work toward crafting and implementing Energy Descent Action Plans.  There will also be an opportunity to connect with others from your neighborhood.  

We are very excited about moving toward a more cooperative and joyful future.  The knowledge of what to do already exists; it’s just scattered throughout the community.  This is the beginning of our tapping and integrating that knowledge, making it available to everyone, and putting it to work in a plan for resilient communities.

So please pass this on to anyone you think should be there.  There’s a lot needing to be done to create a resilient future in our region for ourselves and our children.  Please join us and help shape that future. 

And thanks to our cosponsors: 

• Bright Neighbor
• Center for Earth Leadership
• City Repair
• Common Good Finance
• Portland Permaculture Guild
• Portland Peak Oil
• ReCode Oregon
• St. Francis of Assisi Church
• Transition Sunnyside
• TLC Farm
• Washington County Peak Oil

Announcing Agile Open Northwest 2010! This Agile Open Space event will be held February 9th and 10th, 2010, in the Seattle Center Northwest Rooms. Please see http://www.agileopennorthwest.org for registration information and further details.

We invite you to our fourth annual Agile Open Northwest conference. Alternating each year between Portland and Seattle, AONW conferences bring together practicing members of the Northwest Agile communities to explore the latest developments in agile software development. We held our third annual event last year in Portland and enjoyed another great success. Registration is $125.00 for both days, including light breakfast and lunch. This low-cost regional conference is a great opportunity to connect with the local agile community, experts and novices alike.

Please join us this year as we host 125 experienced, collaborative, committed agile practitioners from the Northwest U.S. (and beyond) in tackling the issues around our recurring theme "Agile for Real." As in past years, attendance is limited to a predetermined number in order retain the many advantages a small conference has to offer.

Here is a comment from a previous attendee:

"These two-day Agile Open Northwest conferences are an extremely good value. ..[Y]ou learn directly from practitioners in the agile community what works and what doesn't. I attended the first two of these conferences, they were stunningly good... loads of practical, useful stuff and stimulating discussions." -- Ian Savage, PNSQC Program Chair

More information can be found at http://www.agileopennorthwest.org. Registration is open now. We look forward to seeing you there.

Generally acknowledged best practices for software development strongly favor co-location, but with mergers, acquisitions, outsourcing, and off-shoring the co-located team is becoming an endangered species. Teams now are commonly project-based and geographically distributed. How can we work effectively with team members in different physical locations?

Learn from key open source leaders that with the help of virtual teams produce some of the highest quality, most widely used software today. Come prepared to speak your mind, share your experience, listen and learn about working in a virtual team. If you are involved anywhere in the software development lifecycle, this event is for you.

What is an Unconference?

An Unconference is the inverse of a conference, in that there’s no predetermined, pre-set schedule, agenda, or speaker lineup. Utilizing the concept of OpenSpace, this unconference is the coming together of participants, with no predetermined agenda or program, to have an open discussion and share insight in a place where experts and beginners are equal. You won't be lectured at, rather you'll leave with a better understanding of a topic and the satisfaction of being heard outside Q&A time.

The OpenSpace methodology is carefully designed to elicit maximum involvement and creativity in a constructive atmosphere. It is also highly flexible so that the content is entirely determined by you -- the participants. This is not to suggest that the conference will not have content or outcomes, for there certainly will be both. Achievement in the meeting will be totally dependent upon individual and collective responsibility to make it happen. The content is what each person shares, and the outcome is what we will all create. The event will be inventive, creative, productive and full of surprises.

Capacity: 160 attendees

Audience: From executives whom are concerned with productivity, quality and cost management to product owners, analysts, developers, designers, and testers all who are attempting to share a single thought and build upon it.

Tickets | Volunteer

Announcing Agile Open Northwest 2012! This Agile Open Space event will be held February 7th and 8th, 2012, in the Northwest Rooms of Seattle Center in Seattle. Spaces at this event fill up fast! So register today to make sure you get a space. For registration and further details go to :

http://www.agileopennorthwest.org

This will be our sixth annual Agile Open Northwest conference. Alternating each year between Portland and Seattle, AONW conferences bring together practicing members of the Northwest Agile communities to explore the latest developments in agile software development. We held our fifth annual event last year in Portland and enjoyed another great success. Registration is $150.00 for both days, including light breakfast and lunch. This low-cost regional conference is a great opportunity to connect with the local agile community, experts and novices alike.

Please join us this year as we host 125 experienced, collaborative, committed agile practitioners from the Northwest U.S. (and beyond) in tackling the issues around our recurring theme "Agile for Real." As in past years, attendance is limited to a predetermined number in order retain the many advantages a small conference has to offer.

Here is a comment from a previous attendee:

"These two-day Agile Open Northwest conferences are an extremely good value. ..[Y]ou learn directly from practitioners in the agile community what works and what doesn't. I attended the first two of these conferences, they were stunningly good... loads of practical, useful stuff and stimulating discussions." -- Ian Savage, PNSQC Program Chair

More information can be found at http://www.agileopennorthwest.org. We look forward to seeing you there!

Sponsored by AgilePDX, Agile Open Northwest, TAO QA & Dev Forums, PNSQC:

"Agile Testing: How do WE Make it Work?"

As our organizations move toward "Agile” for developing software, we all face the challenge of understanding how to adapt our former roles and ways of working to new work roles and processes. How do we ensure the continued value of testing?

Join us in Open Space to share your questions, challenges, strategies, success stories, and how you've overcome stumbling blocks.

In small groups, we’ll discuss topics such as:

· How is Agile testing different from how we’ve always done it? · How do we know what to test? · How do we know what not to test? · On Agile teams, when does testing happen and whose job is it? · What is Exploratory Testing and why should we care? · How do regression tests work? · How does testing improve my design? Should it? · How do we ensure it is cost effective? · What do people mean when they say, "no defects”? · Does Agile change how we test or does it just raise the existing issues?

Bring the topics you feel passion for and add them to the list!

Each self-organizing discussion group will create a document or other record of their discussion, ideas, questions, and insights. We’ll share everyone’s experiences at the end of the day.

Who should attend?

· Testers facing an Agile adoption/People new to the testing role/Testers eager to jump in · Devs who want to get serious about defect-free code · CTOs and Managers of Test/Validation, Dev, Application Delivery · Academics preparing new software/IT professionals for the real world

Cost to attend: $75 per person (Register early. We expect to sell out.)

Agile Open Northwest, a non-profit alliance of agile practitioners in the US Pacific Northwest region, presents our ninth annual Open Space conference exploring agile practices, techniques, realities, and visions!

Our new theme for the Open Space this year is “Agile Vision”:

What does Agile let us see with fresh eyes? Where do you see Agile taking your shop? What do we see as the future of Agile? What role do you see for “QA” and estimates and projects? Do you see Agile scaling beyond company boundaries to the entire value chain? Do you see Agile scaling beyond the software industry?

For those of you with a downtown phobia, this is our first Lean Coffee on the inner eastside!

Lean Coffee discussions are where we discuss a wide variety of questions that you bring for feedback, inquiry and laughs with fellow Agile practitioners.

Sharpies and sticky notes are our agenda-setting tools of choice.

Are you not sure how to start solving the tough problems that you and your organization face? Do you ever wish that you could leverage the combined knowledge of your coworkers to innovate? Have you ever wanted to cross-pollinate practices across your company without having to plan a conference without PowerPoint and speakers and did I mention PowerPoint? Then Open Space might be right for you. Open Space is a facilitation technique that empowers large groups to leverage the shared knowledge of the attendees to self-organize to understand and ultimately solve problems (large and small) facing individuals, teams, and organizations. Open Space Technology has been used by corporations, non-profits, and community organizations to share knowledge, work through problems, and determine how to take action. At this month’s AgilePDX, we’ll learn how two Portland companies, ShiftWise and Tripwire, use Open Space to spread knowledge across team silos, identify organizational impediments, and guide change from the bottom up, while injecting some fun and teambuilding.

The discussion leaders:

Phyllis Thompson is the Agile Process Coach at ShiftWise, where she is has participated in the company’s agile adoption since 2012. Phyllis has worked with agile teams for nearly 10 years in a variety of roles: Scrum Master, Agile Project Manager, Product Owner, and as the manager of a PMO that rolled out an “Agile PLC” and Scrum/Agile training to more than 100 engineering team members at Serena Software, which used Scrum to develop an agile project management tool.

David began his career as a software engineer hacking on the Java Virtual Machine. After realizing that the challenges of leading people were just as exciting as crafting software that delights its users, he turned his attention to working with others to help grow individuals and Teams within the context of a larger organization. He feels that listening and communication are fundamental to understanding others and understanding yourself. By day, David is a member of Tripwire’s Agility Enablement Team. By night, he is an adjunct lecturer in the Computer Science Department at Portland State University. David likes watching things grown whether they are Teams, companies, his students, his family, or the vegetables in his garden.

As usual, pizza and pop are sponsored by the good folks at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC).

Last month we learned from Phyllis Thompson and David Whitlock about "Open Space", a facilitation technique for group learning and problem solving, and how they've used it in their workplaces. This month we're going to give you a chance to try out the power of an Open Space un-conference yourself. We will be taking the group through a lightning quick 70 minute open space format, where you will help set the agenda and drive the discussions alongside your fellow Agile

PDXers. Come see what value can emerge out of an unplanned and loosely structured conference format. As usual, pizza and pop are sponsored by the good folks at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC).