As part of the CTC / CEC process, one of the requirements is to actively support the Agile Community. This can be done through organising meetups, talking at an event or helping within the Scrum Alliance Community. Today I will focus on the work I have done with the Scrum Alliance Community.
It was suggested that a great way to help within the Scrum Alliance Community would be to help out at local organised events through Scrum Alliance or help out as part of the larger Global Scrum Gathering group. There doesn’t seem to be any Scrum Alliance groups in Scotland so my search had to go global. Maybe we should try and fix the Scotland scenario but that is for another day!
One activity that I really enjoyed was reviewing the abstracts for the Global Scrum Gatherings. I have worked as part of five review teams so far (Denver, Lisbon, Portland, Amsterdam and North Carolina) and it has been very rewarding. Scrum Alliance have gotten better at advertising this opportunity as time has progressed and have now started to advertise opportunities for reviewers via their Linkedin page. You will need to fill out an application form stating your experience and what not, but it isn’t too taxing.
So what is involved? You are added to a group slack page where people can ask questions, chat and network. You are then assigned into groups each with their own topic i.e. Scrum Mastery, Product Ownership, Coaching etc and you have your own Slack sub-channel to ask questions. You are then assigned up to 15 abstracts (outlines for workshops or talks) to review on behalf of Scrum Alliance. Each abstract will have 5 different reviewers from your group so that there is diversity in choice and relevance and I feel this makes it a lot fairer on the person who is doing the talk or workshop. A recent improvement was the removal of names of the person wanting approval so that no judgement could be cast.
The review is done in a separate tool which Scrum Alliance will sign you up to and give you access to. It is really easy to use and navigate and contains everything you need to review so it is a really smooth experience.
What did I learn? Lots. It is great to see so many highly motivated people each with their own viewpoint or take on Agility. It made me realise just how much time and effort is actually spent preparing, thinking, writing, performing and rewriting (inspect and adapt, so to speak) to actually bring one of these great talks or workshops into fruition. I admire the courage of the people who do it and are passionate about it, I will get there some day!
One cool opportunity I was given was to apply to be a part of the Amsterdam Gathering helper group where you could help out behind the scenes at the gathering but with work commitments, I couldn’t make it. This opportunity would have been great to help the community further and wouldn’t have been made available to me if I hadn’t applied to be a reviewer.
As a reward you will be given $100 off of the ticket price of the gathering, so win win!
Daily Scrum 