Agile Alliance Dec-07 Board Meeting, Programs, Commitments
Last weekend I attended my second Agile Alliance Board meeting. The first was at the Agile Alliance conference, when I was elected, but we didn’t really cover a lot of “new ground”, as the goal of that first meeting was a hand-off from the previous Board (thank you to them for their hard work). Since then, our Board has been meeting monthly via a teleconference. Of course, as agilists, we prefer face-to-face (warm) communication, and I was glad to get together with people who I both respect and who are enthusiastically committed to Agile.
I gained a much better understanding of how the Agile Alliance really works during this meeting. The purpose of this post is to raise awareness of this to the larger community in the hopes that I may be able to drive greater levels of participation.
Simply put, the Agile Alliance gets things done two ways.
- Through operations approved by the board – e.g., running the web site
- Through programs
Number (2) is the key way of getting things done. Simply put, all of the really interesting things that get done in the Agile Alliance are done through programs. (To see a list of current programs, click here: http://www.agilealliance.org/show/7).
To repeat: all of the interesting stuff is done through programs.
- The Agile Conference (annual big one!) is a program.
- The Gordon Pask Award is a program.
- Other conferences that we sponsor is a program.
At the Board meeting, I decided that I wanted to increase my involvement in helping promote Agile practices in two areas, both of which are congruent with my position statement.
- Increase our understanding of what our members seek from the organization (aka “market research”).
- Help the Agile Alliance improve its focus by crafting a snappy and motivating “We’re #1 Statement” (e.g., “The Agile Alliance is the world’s best organization at _”).
To accomplish these goals, both of which will require some money, I intend to… submit a program proposal. I’ll keep you posted on my progress and the proposal I create (probably through Google docs or basecamp, or similar, suggestions?).
Note that the Agile Alliance will fund programs. A non-profit can fund items. We may fight a little harder to keep the price low because we don’t have a lot of money, and we are, after all, a member organization. But, (KEY POINT NEXT) the Agile Alliance does providing funding for programs that meet our charter.
I therefore invite you to consider submitting a program proposal on a topic that you think would help promote Agile practices to the Alliance. I know I am.
PS. I also made two commitments to my fellow Board members at the meeting. I’m stating them publicly, so that I have even more motivation to get them done. I will promote the Agile Alliance to our clients, asking our clients to:
- Join the Agile Alliance (members provide funding and with more funding we can do more programs and therefore do more to promote Agile)
- Be active in the 2008 conference (submit papers, experience reports, etc.)
- I will share the structure of our marketing communications plan to fellow Board members so that they can see how we structure our activities (thanks to Rich Mironov, our Chief Marketing Officer, for creating an agile plan)
Luke
