The core protocols article published in Methods And Tools

Already a few years I’m reading the internet magazine "Methods And Tools"
When Franco asked me this year if I wanted to write an article for the summer edition, I was delighted.

Very quickly I was stuck. Jim and Michele had written Software for Your Head. It took me 5 serious attempts to read the book. I only did this because I loved Jims earlier work
The idea of the core, I liked from the start, but I could not get it. (Or I was afraid to try it.) My first bootcamp changed made me understand what was the core. When someone like Jim who wrote a great book before had failed writting a book about the core. Who was I to claim to be better?

I realized I wanted to do this with a team. So I asked a few booted people if they wanted to help me. Lot’s of great idea’s where gathered, but again the article did not get started.Then one day I was in the car while my wife was driving us to some great place to visit in France , I started writing,  … I was happy I had started. I knew I was in a flow.

I still was not happy about the format. Before I finished what I had to say, I got a great idea about making it a conversation. And before I even had the time to finish my rewrite, Emmanuel Gaillot pushed me some do the conversation in a more natural flow.

In retrospect it would have been better to finish one version and then perfect it to another version and then another one.  At least I would always have a version to publish. On the other side I would have wasted time writing it in a way I already knew I was not happy to publish it.

At the same time I was writing the article, multiple people where editing and changing my language into understandable English. I started by asking perfection games to diffent people, then I realized I trusted them enough to give them full editing acces  to my document.
This is when google docs showed his full force to me. At multiple time we had 3 or more people editing the same document. (In total we had more then 3000 versions)

Most of the people that helped me out where that are using the core. I also asked for help from agile guru’s  when I started mixing agile and core idea’s.  On top of the questions I asked I got some great advise on how I could make the text even more readable.

In the end 14 people helped me out. (And that is only the people that had read write acces to the document, much more people had given feedback on printed versions.)

In order of the time people got involved:
Jim & Michele MccarthyEls Ryssen, Paul Reeves, Emmanuel Gaillot, Christophe Thibaut, Adam Feuer, Ralph Miarka, Mary Poppendieck,Gino Marckx,Alistair Cockburn,Philip Almey, Lillian Nijboer, Esther Derby.

One thing I regret, is that the article does not mention the agile games group I created last week.

I hope you enjoy the article: //www.methodsandtools.com/PDF/mt201002.pdf

Update: The text version can be found here.

Please tell me what you think of the conversation style we used. Does it distract you, does it keep your attention?
Anything else? please leave a comment…