This week I was ALE 2011. To remember and share my experience I will write an improvement game

What I like about ALE 2011:

• I liked the talks I saw (even if I walked away during some when I had the feeling I learned enough and I wanted to look what I could learn in another session.)
• ALE was self-organized with boundaries
• An XTC in Berlin
• It was the first time I saw a good integration between normal talks and open space
• The 30 minutes talks focuses speakers on the core of their message
• the open space offered place to have discussion on these topics
• Dinner with a stranger
• The first keynote (from Rachel Davies) had a big impact on what was discussed in the open space
• The sponsors were there but did not push things
• A sponsor (Scrumdesk) using his money to support community activity (the Retrospective t-shirts)
• people from so many countries
• lotsofhumorandfun
• family program
• Olaf’s thank you message to the students ”thank you for letting us being on your team”
• The awesomeness from the audience.
• Twice singing Happy Birthday for Oana
• a whole conference participants retrospective led by Ken
• Doing a raindance with +100 people
• an old friend walking around in a PairCoaching t-shirt
• Lot’s of cameras around
• Cameras that visually disappear during talks
• Lots of vlogs recorded by Greetings from Delft
• Being interviewed about what PairCoaching really is..
• Even ALE skepticals showed up
• The event started with 40 people coding together
• The correct use of the word resources
• The event happened close to CheckPoint Charlie
• lots of people connected with me  on linkedin, twitter, slideshare after the conference
• I was able to set borders on what I did and what not, regarding leading of sessions.
• I checked out, when I needed.
• I shared a room with an incredible man
• I had two times a great talk while flying
• I started to call myself a FirstFollower
• someone took a picture with my camera during my talk
• That someone was implementing something from my talk
• we had a BritishStandup comedian with a presentation about Feature Injection
• I learned about kids doing hard work for fun…
• I learned about banks being open only 4 weeks a year
• I learned you don’t loose weigth by watching a scale
• We had guerrilla WIFI
• We had an ALE Post-it war message
• I received great feedback on my Agile & Lean mindset session
• Even better, I received tons of idea’s about Agile Mindset
• I dared to ask everyone in my room to read with me a very long slide out loud
• After the event I heared Jef Patton is finally writing his User Story Mapping book

Update:

• I forgot about the failure cake

What I would like to see improved:

• More people using “The Law of two feet” when they think they can have more value somewhere else. (It’s not restricted to the Open space sessions only)
• Oomps (Official One Minute presentations about the upcoming talks)
• Closing oomps: at the end of the day participants talking back what they learned from all the talks
• an organized way of sharing rooms
• An organized way of sharing Taxi’s, from and to the airport
• A date more families come
• the children room in a more central place
• the children report back what they have done as part of closing oomps
• the family program is on the official program (no second citicians)
• we have a book swashing activity
• we have bar activities (like agile quiz etc)
• all groups of dinner with a stranger are smaller then 10
• I would like to see less “Agile EGO” (We are agilist so we are better then the rest of the world) and more use of prime directive in everything we do.
• People are funny without cynism & sarcasm
• everybody understands what it means to have an open space conference
• More butterflies
• More Bees
• No passive aggressiveness against people not from our community
• a world café
• more developers
• more C-level people
• a book shop
• make it clear if participants will receive a notebook or not
• We have 24 hour wifi
• The Coffee and the rooms are on the same floor
• the toilets are on the same floor
• We should have some room for longer sessions (games?)
• We should help new presenters
• We should encourage speakers to do dry run’s

Personal improvements

• I should have used paircoaching on the coffee mugs instead of paircoaching.net so that more people understood this was a promoting of an idea and not a company
• I buy less mugs then participants
• I can withhold from jokes about Americans (Sorry Brian I was really happy you were at ALE)
• I listen more when I meet awesome people…
• My family joins ALE 2012
• My family is active in ALE 2012.
• My phone keeps working during the conference
• I check the feedback from my session at the door…
• I should have thanked the organizers more…

My improvements are worth 1 out of 10 for me.(This means that ALE receives a 9 out of 10 )