Last night, we ran Agile Vancouver’s first Tech Talk session. The session was co-organized with Skye Cove at Sophos. The tech talk idea came out of our desire to get more technical content into the regular Agile Vancouver meet ups. We also wanted a different format from the regular monthly talking head presentations. Our goal was to create something that was more participatory, that would provide an opportunity for local Agile practitioners and techies to meet and share their knowledge and experience.

When planning the session we really didn’t know how many people would turn up. The previous attempt to do something similar ended up with very few attendees. So I was surprised to arrive at 5.45 and find that about 30 people were already there and more were trickling in. We probably ended up with about 50 people all told. I quickly realized that my idea of having an open discussion would not work — so we turned it into a fish bowl instead. I think that the fish bowl worked quite well and we had a pretty good variety of people opting to come up and speak.

The topic was “Branching and Merging on Agile projects”. Remarkably we managed to stay pretty much on topic throughout. I was especially happy to see some people come forward and posit unconventional positions like:

• source control is not necessary on Agile projects because it is an impediment to communication
• using file locking to control access to different parts of the repository
• distributed vs centralised source control systems

Now that more people are familiar with the fishbowl format, I hope that even more people will participate next time. A few things that we will change for next time:

• Greg Young suggested distributing cards at the start of the session to collect suggestions for the next session’s topic. We can post these on the wall and people can vote on them on the way out.
• Shorten the length of the fish bowl so that there is more opportunity for small group interaction after the session. I think restricting the fishbowl to 1 hour is sufficient.
• Greg also suggested collecting feedback on the session that can be collected at the point when people vote on the session.

I’d like to try some small group sessions or micro-open space sessions, but for now I think that it will be good to try to keep the format consistent as more people get the chance to become familiar with it. If you have other feedback or ideas for the event please let me know!