Successful internal OpenSpace meeting yesterday

Yesterday, I hosted an OpenSpace conference in the Valtech office in Paris. The theme was ‘pet projects that we want to work on (though we already work fulltime)’. I was a bit apprehensive, as my previous experience had been in London; I was not sure how a French audience would react.

I think I can say that, by and large, it has been a success. Because it was taking place in the evening after the usual daytime assignments, we could only provide for 2 one-hour long sessions in 4 rooms(plus one hour of preparation beforehand). So, as expected, a few topics did not gather enough momentum and were dropped in favour of somemore popular ones.

I attended two that gathered half-a-dozen people. Not much compared to the 30 or so participants, but more than enough to have a productive session.

As it appears, I am going to take the lead in organizing a public OpenSpace Conference on Agile practices (though we do not want to compete with XP Day Paris). Many things still need to be sorted out, but my goal is to have it happen before the end of year 2007 (my boss would prefer before summer, but somehow I am not confident we can do it so quickly).

Another one I’ll contribute to is lead by David. The plan is to organize bi-weekly evening technical sessions opened to the public and to Valtech consultants.

Sadek told me he had taken more than 200 pictures yesterday (?!). I hope he’ll put some of them on his blog.

I also have my own pictures of the event.