I have had the luxury to attend not one but two Open Space conferences in a row, first as a facilitator for SoCraTes France, a 3 days unconference hosted in the beautiful Château de Massillan, near Orange ; then as a participant at SoCraTes Rennes, a one day event in the capital city of Britanny I have been attending for the past four years.
Here is a short summary of what I gathered from those two events, in no particular order, starting with SoCraTes France.
Elizabeth Zagroba proposed a fun and fascinating session called No vehicles in the park which is intended to make people think critically about the limits of language, prescriptive definitions, and rules when it comes to human beings living in the real world. We spent a lot of time tossing around byzantine arguments about whether or not a wagon carrying a picnic was a vehicle or how does the limit of the park would extend in the atmosphere, based on the eponymous website's questionnaire.
Michel Grootjans actively keeps alive the Belgian tradition of using engaging games to explain important concepts like the importance of flow and the impact of over-utilisation on throughput in a system. I played his Okaloa FlowLab simulation with great delight which left me wondering, as always, about the reasons why so many organisations still insist in micro-managing people and maximising everyone's workload.
There were only 3 people at Angi Guyard's session on Accessibility, but those were the right persons and it was a fresh reminder of the importance of this topic for everyone, not only people with obvious and visible disabilities. Contextual accessibility issues are extremely common, whether it is a parent having to feed their hungry baby while trying to complete some work on website requiring both hands, or a low contrast screen while sitting in a room with intense lighting. We also hinted at possible tools and techniques for testing and test-driving accessibility beyond Lighthouse. Even when building internal software in industrial or corporate contexts, thinking about accessibility is a great way to force the whole software development team to think about their users and usages.
Manon Carbonel asked a question which you need either one minute or several hours to answer: "What is functional programming?", which lead to some interesting - and somewhat diverging - answers as one could guess. We were quite a few to notice how the will and desire to define things impregnates our thinking so deeply we often do not notice how much more impactful doing or using things is, how important the pragmatics of something are. Just like sticking to a strict and closed definition of what a vehicle in a park can lead intelligent folks to deny entrance to people on a wheelchair because it's more important to stick to the lettetr of the rule and our previous commitment to definitions!
I half jokingly asked a follow-up question during lunch, "Is FP Dead?"
Romeu Moura facilitated a meta-session on "How to make the most of open-space conferences?" as a participant and as always found an interesting twist to make it engaging and fun. We first listed fears and concerns each one had, from FOMO to fear of first contact with people, through questions on how to select sessions, frustration of being passive, or how to balance the desire to be heard and seen with the urge to disappear. We also listed possible "solutions" or "help" one could think of, in no particular order. We then tackled each listed fear one by one, and proposed more targeted solutions with a champion assessing whether or not each proposition was helpful. Among the many ideas listed, I noted:
Write tags and topics on a badge you wear to help others know what you are most interested in talking about
Give talks and propose sessions so that people know you and come talking to you
Use the Pacman rule to keep conversations open
When you want to speak or step in a conversation, explicitly timebox your intervention
Ask someone else (a "buddy" or facilitator) to step in on your behalf and hand over initiative to you
Use "hiring criteria" to select talks: Do I want to spend time there with those people?
Use the "law of two feet" as a mandatory rule: If your energy is low somewhere, move as chances are you're contributing to lower other participants' energy
Select topics and sessions you know nothing about, and/or balance those with easy ones depending on your energy level
"Zap" quickly over several sessions
Elizabeth facilitated another session about "Regulated environments" and how does one cope with those when one cares about software craft and agility. Not much concrete answers beyond the fact processes exist for a reason which is often lost in the mist of time, and spending time to give meaning to those frustrating processes goes as long way towards alleviating the pain of working in such environments and sometimes even lead to remediations or improvements.
I advocated a couple of times for Property- and Model-Based Testing and tried to facilitate a session on stateful PBT, modelling and defining properties for a featuer suggested by a participant based on their product. As one could expect this proved quite challenging to complete and we did not go very far, but as always I found the experience joyful and enlightening: The mere effort needed to express things as properties and invariants through conversations often gives invaluable insights on limits and issues with our initial mental model, and suggests improvements before even a single line of actual code is written.
Bastien David proposed an Architectural Kata which I attended. We designed a large scale online auction system and it was really fun to toss ideas around and try to cope with all the requirements and constraints within the 1 hour time frame.
And here are some notes from sessions I attended at SoCraTes Rennes.
Maxime Tual gave a talk about alternative decision processes, drawing from his own experience living in a co-operative or participatory housing. He emphasised the distinction between consent and consensus based decision process suggesting the former was both more engaging and more efficient: Instead of pursuing everyone's agreement to decide, which more often than not ends up in no decision at all, try to ensure everyone can live with the decision by addressing all "reasonable and rational" objections. The details of the process can be found (in French) in this document
We had a discussion mediated by Maxime Dupont about how much, or how little, software development and software developers were involved in politics, and if there was anything to be done about it. To say the discussion was a bit gloomy would be quite an understatement, as there was a widespread acknowledgement of the lack of awareness about ecological and political issues among tech workers, how pointless individual actions and stances were, and the need to rest any action on collectives.
I also attended a session proposed by Anne-Laure Gros on the topic of "test-driving user interfaces". I hope she will share her notes as there were some useful links and not so well known tools and techniques listed. I even shared Oskar Wickstrom's Bombadil as it deserves to be known and used!
But of course those notes fail to convey the joy and energy of all the side conversations I had at lunch, breakfast, or dinner, or in doorways and alleys in between sessions, or around a beer, which form the best part of Open space conferences.