More notes on Agile on the Beach – this is going to go on all week, sorry but there is a lot to get on the record. Maybe only conference-geeks and those thinking of submitting to AOTB will find useful but I’d like to get it on the record and this is my blog 🙂
First off the Agile on the Beach is pretty much the same every year. Unfortunately it has grown over the years as we try and share more information with those submitting. I expect most conferences have the same problem.
Problem #1 the call for submissions is too big, problem #2 people don’t seem to read it. Actually, it is not just that people don’t read it but some people who submit don’t seem to know much about the conference.
The wrong track, Gromit
For example: lots of submissions are put against the wrong track. Many people seem to just submit to whatever track the system defaults to (and this year it looks like Agile Business was the default.)
While we can, and do, move sessions between tracks we don’t do this methodically. With nearly 300 submissions it would be too time consuming to review every session and decide which track it should be in.
Plus, some people deliberately want their submission in a particular track. Last year we had a talk on technical debt submitted to the business track. Before I moved it I happened to ask the submitter why he had gone there not software. His reply: “We deliberately did this because we want to raise the issue with managers.”
Some reviewers will mark sessions down because they are in the wrong track. That is a little unfair but understandable.
Where is Falmouth again?
One problem that seems to growing is people not knowing where the conference is. To be clear: Agile on the Beach is in Falmouth UK – lookup Falmouth on Google maps.
Falmouth is five hours by train from London. Seven hours from Manchester. Nine from Newcastle Upon Tyne.
You can fly into Newquay airport from several UK airports but you are still nearly an hour by taxi from Falmouth.
Both last year and this year we’ve accepted people who then, when they look at how long it takes to get to Falmouth pull out.
What is your conference about?
But that is not the worst.
Every year we get a few submissions, mostly from the USA , which are totally inappropriate, something like “Calisthenics for a younger look.” OK, I guess calisthenics helps make your body agile but did they stop reading at the conference name?
Mostly with some hint that the person who filled in the form is not the speaker. I suspect the semi-famous person has a PA who just submits to everything they can find.
We don’t pay
Similarly we get a clutch of submissions – again mostly from the USA – where in the synopsis the speaker say: “My feed is $1,500 plus travel expenses.”
AOTB only pays speakers a travel allowance, and we say that in the call for submissions.
OK, we do actually pay keynotes. But we choose the keynotes, usually in advance of the call for submissions. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
During the year we get a few people – again largely Americans – who e-mail us to say: “I can keynote you conference blah blah blah…. my fee is blah blah.”
I can’t blame them, they are only trying to make a living. One day someone who we find interesting might even contact us!
(Ummm… maybe I should do it myself rather than waiting to be asked to keynote…)
I am …
A new one this year: round 1 was blind, no bibliography details. The hope was this would help new speakers and increase our diversity.
Some speakers chose to self-identification: they gave their names in the synopsis “I this talk Adam Jones will be talking about…” or even a mini-bio in the synopsis: “Sally Smith will draw on her long experience working as Agile Coach with companies such as blah blah blah”
True we didn’t tell people not to do this. Blind reviewing was an experiment so we didn’t really have any rules. But, some reviewers took a dislike to this – I can see comments which say “Would vote higher but speaker gave their name”
Please please please answer me when I call
Finally, AOTB has a two stage acceptance process.
If you get accepted you get a mail from me saying:
“Congratulations… here is the boring admin details, now confirm you can speak by clicking on this link….”
We know that a) some people can’t get to Falmouth, b) schedule change between submitting in December and acceptance in February, c) people forget they submitted, d) something in the admin details isn’t to their liking, d) some other reason.
Result: some people who submit can’t make it. That is why we ask for confirmation.
If you are accepted I need your reply. And the quicker I get it the better.
If I don’t get a reply after a few days I chase: repeat e-mails, Twitter, LinkedIn, SMS and if I need to I will pick up the phone and call you.
This year one speaker was impossible to contact, no phone number, no Twitter, no LinkedIn. My e-mail may have been going to spam. With a heavy heart I switched them from accept to decline.
Apart from this taking up my time it also delays the work of the rest of the committee, the website, the publicity, ticket sales and everything else. Until we have the programme in place a lot is on hold.
Your submission is important to us, please hold
Plus, we don’t say: “Sorry, your submission was not accepted” until we have our programme in place. When we loose a speaker we make an immediate substitution. It doesn’t seem right to tell a lot of people (about 240) that they are not speaking at AOTB and then a few days later say to one or two “O sorry, can we have you after all?”
We only send the sorries once we have all our speakers confirmed. So, if someone doesn’t reply, and we can’t get hold of them, we have no choice but to wait and try again. Which means everyone else has to wait which is not fair either.
Overall our system works. It is not perfect but I don’t think any system is perfect.
