Agile 20 Reflect Festival
So I have already told you some snippets about the Agile 20 Reflect Festival, which was the largest free Agile Festival in the world so I want to tell you a little more
The whole aim of the festival was to build bridges and engage with the various Agile communities around the world in a huge Community led event for the whole Month of February (2021) to coincide with 20 years of the Agile Manifesto. We had three themes for the festival which were: Past, Current and Future of Agile and Agile Communities and 9 Principles which are listed below:
A Distributed Ecosystem: This is not a conference; it’s an ecosystem having a party! And it is not anything that is centrally run! (A distributed, self-organized month-long party)
Free to Everyone: This is a huge free Festival of events and activities occurring in Feb 2021, created by local groups and organisations across the globe, supported by Community volunteers! This is Especially important in the current financial recession and mass layoffs.
Locally Created: Choice of activities rests with the local Agile Community Groups; inclusion diversity and variety are actively encouraged. All this lead locally by our volunteer ambassadors
Globally Connected Ambassadors across the globe engaging with local areas to :-
· Create awareness, so people know
· Registering local meetups and organisations with the festival
· Supporting the creation of activities:
· Helping With Speakers (VSD will help)
· Guides for online hosting
· Code of Conduct
· Facilitating getting the event recordings — centrally available on YouTube (like Agile TED Talks)
· Make this locally led, appropriate to local languages and culture
· Promote reflection and improvement in the Agile community
Accessible and Inclusive Programme Directory: We will have a Festival Programme Directory listing all the events, speakers, and topics and this will be available to everyone to navigate the events/activities. All events will be:
Locally hosted and you register with the local groups and run locally
Open to everyone
When the bookings are full, events can be live broadcast or uploaded to YouTube so people can watch
Community Funded: We will ask existing organisations, associations, and businesses to lend their support. As this is distributed it is likely support will be about providing Access and Social Capital. Supporting organisations will help spread the message on the event and may help with financial support. (We are deliberately trying to limit the need for finance)
Volunteer Speaker Powered: We are actively seeking diversity of Agile and Agility Speakers at all levels (we value new ideas and new voices as much as more experienced ones) to register as Volunteer Speakers and that directory will only be available to the Ambassadors to help meetups and organizations across the globe
Self-navigation — Build Your Own Experience: People will be able to self-navigate their festival, do what they want or just watch it for free from the video archive, they can use these videos under creative commons for learning of any kind. Almost infinite options!
Long Lasting Friendships: As well as the new relationships and huge new interaction between diverse technical, agile practice, and geographic communities, after the festival we will have a huge resource of recorded material that we will make available for free to anyone who wants to navigate that mass of learning. Also, this may lead to long lasting relationships and a continuing community ecosystem.
We this all of the above in mind we set about like bees, engaging with Agile Companies, non-profits, supports, Agile Guru’s and everyone we could collectively get together to support us and when i say support, I mean the message was clear to everyone. We told everyone that supported us that it was free, no one was going to be treated differently and what we co-supported with one business, we did the same with another no one had special treatment. Once that was clear, all the big Organisations came onboard — Scrum Alliance, Scrum.org, PMI and far to many others that i should mention.
But the message was clear and with that they all came, it was like the fields of dreams scenario, build it an they will come amd they did. It was an extraordinary time, like no other in the Agile Community.
Never have I seen so many people come together to build such a great event. In total we had over 800 free events around the world. Over 2 million attendees, 149 different places and 19 different languages spoken. We had truly created a great community.
And whilst I am still celebrating that festival I had always known it was not sustainable in that format. So as a community we have emerged from Agile 20 Reflect Festival to our new community of Access Agile with the focus still being on the principles set out above
Whilst we are in a beautiful state of emergence we are in no rush to over process our previous achievements and currently nurting the new Access Agile Community and inviting people to come join us (I am sure I will write about this shortly). So this is my invite to you, if you read this and want to get involved, please make contact I would love to chat all thing Access Agile
Shelby x
