• Who:         Panel Discussion
• What:        “Will Any Letters Get Me The Job?”
• When:       Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 6 PM CST
• Where:      Omicron-USA, 8725 W. Higgins, Suite 450   Chicago, IL (near O’Hare) (map)

Featured Topic:

What is true certification?  *  The difference between certifications and certificates  *  How does the IT world perceive certification?  *  What certifications you should be pursuing  *  How experience comes into play  *  Can you advance your career without certification acceptance from your peers?

Lead-in Activity:

As always, the first half-hour of the event is reserved for networking and food. Pizza and pop will be provided, so come hungry, grab a couple slices of pizza, and get to know the other attendees who are making Agile Leadership happen in Chicago.

Follow-Up Activity:

Following the talk, attendees will take part in an OpenSpace discussion forum. An OpenSpace session is a high-energy experience: if you’ve never participated, be prepared to be surprised! For more about Open Space, see the original definition at AgileOpen.net. At least one topic will focus on the theme, but attendees are free to propose any topic for discussion. We always post the results of OpenSpace sessions.

Event Registration:

Please register at www.aplnchicago.org for this event, and to receive email updates and more details about this and other events as they become available.

A frequently-underestimated benefit of the team “war room” is how it enables emergent knowledge. If I mumble to myself (as I frequently do) “now why is Apache redirecting us there…?” someone is likely to mumble back “checked the root htaccess lately?” and perhaps my problem is solved. Great fun. Great help. But hard to achieve on a distributed/virtual team.

I’ve enabled this sort of behavior in virtual teams via wiki, and also via Twitter (thanks to Chris Spagnuolo for the idea). But Twitter doesn’t have the concept of a “room,” so setting one up for everyone on your team — and keeping it private — is a bit of a pain. And Twitter’s one-username-per-email means some annoying collisions.

Campfire and IRC also have their uses, but cost and security respectively might be a blocker for you. Skype’s “conference” is nice, with the added benefit that you can start a voice call/conference whenever you want. But everyone’s updates live in the Skype app, not on a web page. So if someone new joins the team, they don’t get benefit of reading the team’s history.

I think Prologue is just what I’ve been looking for:

• installable on your own server
• your updates to your team are saved on a web page (you could even incorporate the RSS into your team wiki somewhere)
• flexible permission controls
• familiar blogging-style interface

Check out the live demo or have a download.

It’s a bit long at 9 minutes, but you’ll get the gist if you skim a bit.

Now, is this just a technology demonstration, or it this really coming to a hotel near you? This concept was part of the 2007 Philips “Sense and Simplicity” concept demonstrations, so it may not actually manifest. It all depends on demand, of course.

What it interesting about this is what we can infer from the intent of the concept: the value of design and human interaction in the technological product market.

20 years ago, “design” and “technology” went together like “polka” and “music.” But product managers (product owners) of tomorrow must incorporate design and human interaction into their plans (backlogs), or risk this sort of market response.

Part of it could be the experience of travel itself, and not just the destination. Unless travel has become routine to you, being forced to consciously manage your clothes, toiletries, time, current location and navigation around a new city has a way of focusing your attention on what are otherwise everyday activities. The drive to the airport (and more notably, from your destination airport) is quite a bit different from the routine drive to work. You pay attention, and the meditation folks out there might agree that a mind that practices paying attention is more awake than those that don’t get such practice.

But being in a different place and among different people has its own benefits. When my wife and I return home from a trip, we feel like our senses and thoughts have been stretched, as if we’ve learned to see in a new range of colors and can now enjoy all the ways our home neighborhood shines in the ultraviolet and x-ray portions of the spectrum. The feeling decays slowly, however; I’ve come to modify the Holmes quote to “takes a long time to return to its original dimensions.”

But while it lasts, we find ourselves — for example — being more chatty with strangers than we used to be (after returning from Oklahoma); being more aware of nature, the sky, and recycling (after Seattle); using more public transportation and choosing to pay a little more for better quality food (France). As we lived immersed in these other cultures we adjusted ourselves to them, at first consciously and then automatically taking our behavioral cues from the people and environment around us.

In a way, we became Oklahomans, island-dwellers, Brits, or French. Just as we noticed all the differences about our travel destinations when we first arrived there, upon returning we noticed all the ways — for good or ill — that our hometown might appear different to a foreign traveller.

Having to pay attention. Letting yourself be shaped by a different environment. Seeing your own hometown with the eyes of an outsider.

These are the reasons we love travel beyond just the food or the attractions, and the reasons why, even as we wearily unpack our bags, we feel so alive and awake afterwards. As my wife observes, it makes you wonder about those people who prefer to stay home for the very same reasons!