This conference is well known for been highly interactive and centered on feedback. Even so things have exceeded my best expectations.
Since after sending a draft proposal for session, I'm been asked to participate to a Perfection Game to give and collect suggestions for improving the sessions proposal. I had received useful comments and suggestions from many experienced agilists and had improved the session based the useful and insightful feedback received. And so also all the other proponents.
At the fist day of the conference, every presenter had the chance to introduce and propose his session with a 30 second presentation to all the attendees. This quick face to face presentation helped to decide among 4 parallel ongoing tracks with many interesting sessions. Same for the 2nd day.
For every and each session there were cards in a kanban board and in the back a form that attendees were encouraged to use to provide feedback to the session using the Perfection Game protocol. Writing down my feedback to the sessions I've attended, helped me to reflect on what I was learning, what interested me more and what I'm going to apply or investigate further.
As presenter I received again very useful feedback that confirmed that I was able to implement the improvements suggested before (during the approval process) and also got very interesting suggestions for further improvements.
Most of the sessions were highly interactive providing both contents and live exercises that attendees could use to experiment new things. Presenters were experienced so they were able to give suggestions during the exercises, immediately correct mistakes and provide practical tips personalized for each attendees to help to improve. It is hard to describe the level of involvement of all presenters and attendees, just to give an idea, no one had time to get annoyed or distract or to write tweets or blog posts: everyone was 100% involved.
The experience level of attendees and presenters was another ingredient that made every session a valuable learning experience. Presenters could get deep into advanced topic and attendees contributed with insightful questions. The quality and the relevance of the content of the presentations has been very high. New innovative ideas has been presented, good and known ideas has bee analyzed and presented from different interesting prospectives, and known valuable ideas and practices has been deeper investigated.
There has been also interdisciplinary contributions i.e. from Economical Politic, Psychology and Improvisation theatre.
The friendly informal atmosphere with a very positive attitude and some fun, together with the social events contributed to make the conference a very valuable learning experience and made everyone very relaxed and confident and contributed to a good mood for the presenter to give their best and for the attendees to experiment and get involved with curiosity and willingness to explore and experiment.
In my experience, the best agile conference I've been. Thanks to the organizers for their competence and truthfulness. Plan to be there next year too.
- http://www.xpday.net/Xpday2010/Feedback.html
- http://www.xpday.net/Xpday2010/Program.html
Print | posted @ venerdì 3 dicembre 2010 23:55