AgileBCS

There have been a few discussions lately about the future of AgileBCS. What should we do during our meetings? Should we try to move the focus to more project management-related topics? Should we make it a more general purpose Software development group? Should we move the meeting time (again)?

To make some progress, we’re going to have our first evening meeting at the Fox & Hound on Monday, March 9th at 7pm. The intent is for it to be a mostly informal get-together with some targeted discussion about the future of the group. This is on the BCS Web/Tech Community Calendar as well.

We’re also going to have our regularly scheduled meeting on Friday, March 13th at 12:30pm (location TBD). It will be a bit more focused, but the goal will be the same: make some decisions about group direction and start down the path.

In addition to the above, here are some other ideas that have been put on the table so far:

• Move to one meeting a month.
• Move the meetings to evenings.
• Have one evening meeting and one lunch meeting a month.
• Discuss less developer-centric topics.
• Have more presentation-oriented sessions. (Someone from the group or a guest presents to the rest of the group.)
• Switch between presentation-style and discussion-style meetings.
• Do another book review as a group.
• More actively use the Google group.

There are more ideas to be found; feel free to contribute to the list. However, what we really want to do is find something or a small set of somethings we can do that will provide the most value to the members of the group. Just like any Agile organization, we’ll want to periodically have a retrospective and adjust to continually provide the most value we can.

If you have an idea, you don’t have to wait for one of the meetings to discuss: just send an e-mail to the “agilebcs” Google group. If we’ve got it all worked out by Monday, then that can just be a purely fun, social event.