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Laurent Bossavit & XPday Montreal invite you to co-create an Open Space event:

Customers, Developers, Testers Learning Each Others Languages

What's it about?

Open Space Technology is a way to create a conference, that has been described as having the energy of a productive board meeting coupled with the fun of a good coffee break! Organizations have used Open Space Technology successfully across Canada and around the world for over 15 years to enable spirited and productive dialogue. This approach will allow you to focus on those issues for which you have a passion to discover solutions and strategies.

We invite you to join us in Open Space on Saturday September 23rd, 2006, to help us improve the map of our industry and of the "countries" inhabited by cultures which must collaborate to produce great software: developers, testers, customers, and others yet to be named...

Context

Heard in a software project recently:

    "I've had to go over the requirements with the developers one more time - it's just as if we didn't speak the same language."

We all know that communication is a key factor in the success of software projects, yet too often we go about it like tourists lost in a foreign country: we assume that things work more or less as they do back home, and we hope that by talking slowly and loudly enough people there will eventually understand what we're saying.

Rather than be surprised and dismayed by language and other cultural differences, could we improve our projects by learning to deal with them more effectively ? The Agenda – It Comes From You The agenda for our conversations on the 23rd will be created by your initiative, according your perception of the challenges and opportunities for Learning Each Others’ Language. This approach will allow you to focus on those issues for which you have a passion to discover solutions and strategies. You will also be asked to take responsibility for reporting your ideas and proposals. Your engagement will be essential to our success.

If you want to find our more about Open Space as a meeting approach we suggest you check the web site at www.spiritedorg.com which has links to other Open Space sites as well. The meeting approach will be new for many of you, so expect some pleasant surprises.

Who is Invited?

Project participants of all project “cultures” are welcome in this Open Space – the more variety, the better! Plenary sessions will be in French, and topics may be proposed in and run in any language – it will work itself out!

Our Commitment to You

You are putting in significant time on a weekend, so we make the following commitment to you: we will save session outputs (as digital pictures) and make them available on a Wiki (people can notify the organizers if they don't want their outputs saved). Laurent in particular commits to helping participants write up insights that come up, in the form of articles or blog postings.

A Personal Note from the Sponsors

I'm looking forward to meeting you at this Open Space event. This will be the first time I travel to Montreal. I hope to learn a great deal about the city and the people there, and make new acquaintances. To top it all off, I can't imagine a more appropriate opportunity to discuss the topic of cultural differences, a topic which has been puzzling me ever since I started thinking about what it takes to make software projects work. A bientôt a Montreal!

    -- Laurent Bossavit, Open Space sponsor.

[View the pdf of this invitation]