JCrete 2014

This post is, sort of, a reply to Geertjan’s post about JCrete (https://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/jcrete_2014).

Geertjan describes a group of trees and paths and a river and (purposely or not) lacks to mention he’s describing a forest. It’s great to have people with Geertjan’s reach to present and support this way of organising conferences, but I’d like to give my two cents on the subject.

Before continuing, let me say what Geertjan didn’t: "JCrete is a conference that uses Open Space Technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Space_Technology)”. A description like that is usually simplified as “FOO is an Open Space”. Hmm! We got rid of ’technology' and ‘conference’. 

I’m still surprised to see the amount of people still unfamiliar with OpenSpace Technolgy, but that’s probably because we’ve been using a lot in Barcelona (more on that later), therefore I'm the weird one. As Dmitry said during the wrap-up, this format should be used all around and I completely agree to that. 

But! I think wide adoption of Open Space Technology is still not possible, or that it should happen slowly.

Open Spaces don’t scale well. Even in JCrete things changed comparing 2012 edition and 2014. There were twice as many attendees and I’d say the number of people familiar with Open Space Technology is and how to *use it* remained the same (thus decreasing the %).

While preparing the main room on Sunday evening, some of the un-organizers and I went for a round gathering of chairs. That mutated the day after into a semi-circle around the screen the following days. Ok, we need to see code, it’s true. But then I noticed all rooms ended up in a similar layout. We are still too wired for the sit-and-listen conference format and unlearning this takes time.

In Agile Barcelona there’s been an open space every 6 months for the last few years. That led to some other communities (AngularJS, Java Hispano, Bcn Dev Con,…) to adopt it. The results are usually the same: people unfamiliar with the format, even when it’s explained (including 4 principles and law) still don’t grok it. 

Open Space Technology is easy to explain but hard to use.

I think one of the reasons why people get so surprised in JCrete is because it’s an Open Space, not a Conference. What I’m trying to say here is that when a conference was publicised as a using Open Space Technology, attendees should only hear the ‘Open Space’ part. Actually, it might be a good thing to just use the two terms separately: Conference vs Open Space. These are not exclusive terms though. It’s possible to have the two mixed up: plain-old-cfp-talks-in-slots during the morning and open spaces during the afternoon (see for instance ALE 2014 program http://ale2014.alenetwork.eu/ale14-program/ ).

But I agree with Geertjan on that (1) morning open space followed by (2) at-the-beach, spontaneous sessions in the afternoon followed by (3) wonderful share-all food is plain genius. 

PS: I was really surprised to see talks popup out of nowhere and happen on the so-called 'room 5' (see first picture of  Geertjan’s post) as that is actually the ultimate ‘Open Space’.