#Agile2014

The Volunteer experience

Every year Agile Alliance puts together one of the biggest conference about Agilism. 2014 edition was held in Orlando from July 28th thru August 1st. And I just happen to be a volunteer on it! ☺

As a volunteer is expected from you to be able to help and sign up for different activities that sum up a total of 40 hours of work during the conference.

One of the activities I signed up for was the Bag Packing session, which is I consider was pretty awesome. A little bit of flow, self-organizing, re-adjusting, retrospectives a lots of energy, laughs and cool people. We manage to set up +1800 bags in give or take 8 hours. Everyone took turns, divide work, setting up stations and considering different velocity and always looking for leverage between different lines “of assembling”.

And then for the rest of the week we would become the “purple shirts”. One more cool thing about the T-shirt(besides the color) is the “Ask me!”, people would ask you tons of different questions that would bring out you rabbit task abilities and with that get meet tons of people to say Hi! during the week.

During the week of the main task as a volunteer is to make the speaker happy! This would involved help with the setting up: audio/video, sharpies, papers, etc and most important remind about feedback, this year feedback was electronic, you could scan QR code or use sched feedback button.

There were lots of things to do, but also lots of great people to meet. Marc Johnson really did a great job and everyone was really engaged and fun to be around.

Everyday would start with a stand up so we can all arrange the sessions we were to cover(according to first sign up) and see if any room would need extra help, also we had a wall to post lessons learned and what went great is that Marc set up a whatsapp group so we can ask for help or comment some urgent very quickly.

I really enjoyed the experience, meeting the volunteers, the gratitude attendees and speakers would show us and also Agile2014 by itself! Can’t wait for next year, hopefully I will be as available and lucky as this year to be a part of it ☺