I said I’d post a quick blurb on how things went in our experiment with an OpenSpace brown bag format.

In a word; well.

Here’s how we did it. I reserved three conference rooms with help from Kelly. Once we got together, we put some ideas on the board. We then did a quick show of hands to see what we wanted to discuss. Since we had a small group that wanted to talk about all of our three ideas, we just jumped right in and kept going until we finished. If we were larger or had a clearer split in desired topics, we would have split in to different rooms.

The had three main topics. Dasher, an internal pet project to get more visibility in to various project metrics around SEP, wanted to get some feedback. We discussed global variables in OO languages and their trade-offs. Our last topic was a discussion about practicing, learning not production use, Test Driven Development.

Would we do it again? Next time there is a hole in the brown bag schedule, I would.

I was wandering around the SEP.COMmons after passing a certification test on Friday and I noticed something. We had a whole in our brown-bag schedule. This will not stand! I wanted to try something out. I’ve seen Open Spaces work for conferences, but I was wondering how well they would work for a shorter time frame. Like an hour. With only two rooms.

My plan is to quickly explain the agenda, quickly get some ideas, quickly poll, and quickly break in to two groups to discuss those ideas.

I owe you one blog post about how well it went.

Read about Open Spaces on Wikipedia.