I wanted to let folks know about the upcoming Agile Open Northwest Conference January 30 and 31 at the Kennedy School in Portland, Oregon. As one of the conference co-hosts, I'd like to invite you to come and converse with 100 other eager folks on agile development practices, pitfalls, problems, and challenges.

When we started creating an open space conference last fall, we didn't know whether any one would show up. Well that's not been a problem. So far, over 80 have signed up. Space is filling up fast. We're limited to 100 due to the size and space restrictions at the Kennedy School.

If you aren't familiar with how an open space works, it may seem like an unstructured event, but in actual fact it is highly structured—only that structuring happens at the conference. During the welcoming/opening of the conference, attendees are invited to post a topic they'd like to discuss. Each one and a half hour session will have the opportunity for several concurrent topics being discussed. Each day the "scheduled set of topics" can be rearranged—when new items are of interest, they get posted on the visible schedule (which is created at the conference).

Given the mix of attendees, I expect quite a range of topics to be discussed, ranging from how to manage distributed teams, to how design fits in, how certain tools support agile development, how testing and q/a fit in, how to effectively engage customers and collect reqts, etc., etc. But this is all speculation on my part because the people who attend will post topics they wish to discuss.

One highlight of our conference will be a Co-Evolution Picnic, co-hosted by the Eclipse Foundation. Ward Cunningham will launch this progressive conversation on the future of tools and methods in a participatory panel format called a "goldfish bowl."

I look forward to meeting you there!