The copy of Open Space book that was read by the first group of volunteers.

A memory lane of the Agile community in Singapore — Part 4 (New organisers)

In part 3, I shared the extensive use of Open Space format for the regular meetups. This last part of the series shares how we gradually grow a group of volunteers to run the regular meetups.

We met last week and you’ve indicated your interests in facilitating the Open Space in Agile Singapore’s meetups.
— A reply to the first group of volunteers

In the March 2014’s Open Space meetup, I convened a session inviting people to start a volunteer group of Open Space facilitators for the regular meetups. Farid, Xing Yi, Dominik and Michael Chik were the first formal group of volunteers. The purpose was to provide opportunities to learn organising events in a supported environment.

It started at that space and time.

What I tried at the beginning was requiring the volunteer to read the Open Space book (if he/she is new to it) and decide the range of responsibilities he/she wants to cover. I’d then work on those that required support. In short, the volunteer is leading the event and I’m providing support (financial, resources and experience).

We don’t have much processes. This is the only ‘formal’ email to get new faciliators prepared and organised.

In retrospect, this simple process works pretty well as it provides a few things:

• cater to a variety of appetites (range of responsibility) for different people
• a progressive approach to take more responsibilities
• grow the awareness of facilitation skills

This lasted until end of 2015 when I hand over the whole of regular meetup organisation to the volunteers.

Since 2016, they took over the whole regular meetup organisation without my involvement (except to claim for food expenses). They decide how to run it, change the membership and can change the meetup format to something else. The number of organisers grew and we saw new venues introduced.

Oct/16 meetup at Palo IT Innovation Studio (photo by Rohit)

Jul/16 meetup at SPH News Center (photo by Michael Ong)

A joint meetup from#AgileSG , #UXSG and #ProductBeer communities to wrap up 2016. (photo collage by Michael Ong)

Our present organisers are from many interesting backgrounds: Farid Baharuddin (NEC), John Turnbull (ThoughtWorks), Marcelo S Cosas (SCB), Neal Ang (SPH), Riju Kansal (ThoughtWorks), Rohit Arora (Barclays), Sergey Shishkin (Teralytics), Sharan Mangalore (NUS ISS), Steven Koh (GovTech) and Bryan Long (Stacck).

Looking forward to seeing what they’ll bring forth in 2017!

This is the end of the 4 part series. Other parts are available here:
Part 1: The beginning
Part 2: What inspired Open Space?
Part 3: Open Space meetups

What’s next? I’m probably going to write about Agile Singapore conference. Keep a lookout around this space! =)