I have been in this profession a long time, and I have spent a lot of it engaging with communities all over the globe. Conferences, meetups, training rooms, kitchens, hallways. Everywhere I have gone, it has been the people that made it.
I have keynoted, spoken, facilitated workshops, led training sessions, and advised conference programs. I have also organized conferences, sat on the team that built them, signed up as a volunteer, and shown up as an attendee just to learn.
Sometimes I am on the stage. Sometimes I am at the registration desk handing out badges. Sometimes I am in the back row taking notes. It depends on the room and what the community needs that day.
The agile world is home base. But I have spent real time well outside it.
The professional facilitation community. The training community. UX and design conferences. Product and startup meetups. Each one has its own shape and its own people. Each one teaches me something I take back into the others. The agile community is stronger when its leaders have actually been in the other rooms it borrows from.
My wife is an agile coach too. Both of our kids have volunteered at conferences I have gone to.
We do this together. They know these communities, and these communities know them. The friendships have spanned families.
I have made friends in every single one of these places.
Some I see once a year. Some I have not seen in a decade and we pick up where we left off. New friends every trip. Pubs after the keynote. Dinners with families. Weekends in someone else's city.
I have stayed in friends' homes on most continents. And I have lost count of how many agile people I have hosted in mine, here in Sydney.
The work I am proudest of is helping emerging communities grow.
The meetup of twenty people in a co-working space that became a regional conference. The first time a country held its own Regional Scrum Gathering. The local group of practitioners that found each other and realised they were not alone.
I did not watch this from a distance. I showed up. Speaking when they needed a speaker, facilitating when they needed a facilitator, sometimes just being there so the room had one more friendly face from somewhere else. Helping a community come into its own is the most rewarding part of this work. It is why I keep showing up.
The food. The cities. The music. The markets.
Every region has its own thing. The community I am there for is the reason I go. The place is the reason I leave changed.
Photos coming soon. Faces from rooms across the years. Conferences, meetups, kitchens, hallways.
This is the substance behind the Community commitment in my platform: a board member who has been in your room, on your stage, in your conversations, on your continent.
Not from a slide deck. From the rooms.
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