Gentle reminder, the early bird submission for the Agile India 2012 Conference closes on 26th Sep 2011.

Visit our submission system to get started.

Some resources to help you with your submission:

• How to Submit a Proposal?
• Everything You Should Know about Submitting a World-Class Proposal
• Early Bird Submission: What’s the big rush?
• Overview of the Review Process
• Important Milestones
• Compensation for speakers

Update: Stage Proposals are closed.

Sessions proposals are open now; visit: http://submit2012india.agilealliance.org/proposals

Over the last few months we have seen a huge increase in members announcing events as discussion on the Agile Alliance LinkedIn group. I think this is a good thing, but Diana and I, as the moderators of this group, have some concerns.

• There is too much noise about event announcements.
• We don’t see why they need to be discussions. There is nothing to discuss about an event announcement. We feel it would be better to add it under News. (I wish LinkedIn would create a new tab called Events. Then folks can publish their events there. For now please use the News.)
• There are some community run, non-profit events, which we know are really helpful for the community. And we want to promote them. So as moderators, we will make them as featured discussion/news.
• There are lots of company run webinars/seminars. Sometimes, we are not sure if they are real events that help the community or are more of marketing gimmicks. We hope our members are smart enough to weed the noise out. So for now we’ll not really do much about it. Except that we’ll request members to avoid using this forum for such marketing events. Also if you notice such posts, please comment on it. This would create bad reputation for the companies and hopefully members will stop misusing this forum.

I’m a strong believer in Distributed Cognition and the Broken-Window-Syndrome. If I see a lot of marketing posting in a forum, I would be encouraged to add more marketing posts or I’ll leave this forum coz there is too much noise. But if we maintain our discussions clean, spammers will be strongly discouraged to add noise.

Also as members of this community we can help. We can comments and discourage spammers. As moderators, Diana and I, delete any such posts whenever we find them. If the post is quite offensive, in the past, I’ve even banned members.

Some more thoughts on, as user group moderators how to keep the spammers out.

I hope this will help us keep this forum clean.

If you have other ideas or want to comment about this approach, please leave your valuable comments below.

This year, Laurent Bossavit and J. B. Rainsberger have taken over as the Directors of the Gordon Pask Award Program. They invite you to participate in the Gordon Pask Award program. They would like to improve the program in a number of ways, including collecting nominations throughout the year, researching candidates’ contributions to the agile community and giving everyone a greater chance to get to know past winners. We need your help to do this well.

For the moment, we seek volunteers to help with work such as:

• advertise and promote our initiatives on weblogs, in discussion groups, in user groups, at conferences, and wherever you can garner attention
• design a physical Gordon Pask Award prize
• interview Brian Marick about the story behind instituting the Gordon Pask Award in 2005
• interview past award winners and write articles about them
• connect the program with public relations or press outlets to help promote the award and raise its profile in the larger software community
• suggest changes to the nomination process
• suggest something special for the fifth year of the award (2009)
• design a logo and color scheme for the Gordon Pask Award

If you would like to help, please send email to [email protected] and tell them how you’d like to help. You might tell them you’d simply like to help in whatever capacity needed, or that you have a specific task or project in mind to which to contribute. We welcome all comers.

Just noticed that the Agile Alliance Group that I has created in LinkedIn is growing massively. We have 1403 members so far. If you believe in Agile, join this group and show your support.

To join this group on LinkedIn click the following link: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/37631/0FF74232FB92 (You’ll need a LinkedIn Id. If you don’t have one you can always create one for free)

I hope joining this group will activate the consciousness of belonging to the Agile community as a network.

When I was standing for the Agile Alliance board election in Aug 2007, in my position statement, I claimed that if I get on the board I want to “connect the dots”. I did not get on the board, but later when I got the Pask Award, I claimed again that, I really want to focus on “connecting the dots”. That would be my theme or vision for the next couple of years.

If you know me, you know that I’m really passionate about building a network of highly skilled, talented and passionate professionals. Personally I have experience the magic of working/collaborating with such folks. It is the knowledge and learning from these folks that has made me what I’m today.

In the Agile community, we have a lot of Agile practitioners who are doing great work. But they all seemed to be scattered all over the place like islands in an ocean. Trying to connect these islands [practitioners] can bring a lot of value in terms of knowledge sharing and identifying innovative idea and concepts. I think Agile Alliance is in great position to do this. So with the help of Agile Alliance I want to build a global community of these folks by bringing them closer and facilitating collaboration between them. Networking them is the first step towards this.

Hence recently I created a group for Agile Alliance on LinkedIn.

Purpose of the group: To connect Agile practitioners. If you are a supporter of Agile Alliance and Agile in general, please join this group.

Many professionals I know, have a linked in account today where they maintain their profile, resume, connections with other professionals, recommendations, etc on LinkedIn. IMHO, I am hoping that this existing informal network will provide a simple way for me to connect the dots and build a network of Agile practitioners who support Agile Alliance. Linkedin has another feature called “Recommendations” which is another way for the community to recommend and certify other practitioners to build a trusted network. Recommendations could be an alternative to “over the counter” certificates.

So if you would like to join this group on LinkedIn click the following link: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/37631/0FF74232FB92

I hope joining this group will activate the consciousness of belonging to the Agile community as a network.