As an Enterprise Agile coach and Rally Coach Partner, for me, this was the event of the year (and I’m speaking at 2 other conferences coming up later this year!)
So… just a day ago I got back from the RallyON 2011 conference out in Boulder, CO. If I were to sum up my experiences in one sentence it would be: “An awesome-sauce of a time.” – Need help translating?
I believe this was probably one of the best Agile conferences I’ve been to ever. Ryan Martens (@rallyon) and his incredible team put together one of the most interactive and fun conferences that simply gave back to the community of practice what is desperately needed: An opportunity to talk about what they wanted to talk about.
Would you pay to go to a conference, hotels, rental car fees, etc and find out that Day 2 of the conference was… open to whatever people wanted to talk about with no agenda??? Well, that’s exactly what happened, and it worked. The Open Space during day 2 was fantastic. There was so much information and learning going on you could almost cut it with a knife.
So instead of just ranting about how #epic it was, I’m going to just put together some bullet points of highlights that were just dandy:
- Getting to hear Ryan Martens speak about “living the dream.” – You had to be there!
- Getting to see how passionate the Rally Software people are about their work in the Agile space.
- Day 1 – Tons of great speakers talking about everything from Kanban to building great Agile teams – [[Get all the notes of Day 1 here]]***
- Beautiful downtown Boulder – I think the happiest people in the world all live in Boulder, seriously.
A perfect day in Boulder, CO - Day 1
- A beautiful hotel – St. Juliens – Highly recommend going there.
- A social experiment with a kick-butt crew from StackExchange (@aalear and @mpmobile) – Bringing community building to a conference worked! Taking questions from the conference and crowd-sourcing online communities to answer them. #winning
- Networking with some of the most passionate and helpful Agile coaches around!
- Day 2 – Open Space – What more can I say? This was really neat! [[Get all the notes of Day 2 here]]***
A Cold Snow Day 2??? Crazy weather
- My open space talk on Agile and Social Media
- Continual Agile-conversation, from the conference to talking over good Boulder, CO local food joints.
- Again, and I cannot stress this enough for me: Meeting some of the most passionate, helpful, and happy people in the Agile community. Thumbs up!
All in all the conference was top notch. The only downside was that I got stuck in Denver because of a sudden blizzard. ~
Thanks again Ryan Marten and your Rally crew, you guys did an amazing job. I’m already looking forward to the next one!
Deanna DiCristo (1)
Himali (1)
Peter,
Wow, thanks for such a great post on the event WE shared this week. I really appreciated your jumping in the social media front in so many ways. (tweeting, posting, speaking and coaching new folks!)
Sorry to see you got stuck by a blizzard on Wednesday PM. That was a good piece of feedback for next year:)
All the best,
Ryan
Ryan, thanks again so much for putting together this conference. It was awesome!
Great post that really captures this exceptional conference. A high energy group of passionate professionals in a fantastic setting. Kudos to Ryan the Rally team!
For sure. Shout out to Rally!
Great post that really captures this exceptional conference. A high energy group of passionate professionals in a fantastic setting. Kudos to Ryan Martens and the Rally team for such a successful, engaging meeting!
Peter, great to hear you had such a good time and especially that Day 2 was a success for you.
Ken
Thanks man! It was great meeting you! Keep in touch!