Please influence the Agile community
How ?By nominating someone for the Gordon Pask award. You can get the official description of the award from Brian's blog; I'll tell you what it means to me.
I was awarded the Gordon Pask last year, at the Agile 2006 conference. It was a weird moment. I was stressed out and tired from presenting too many things. I made a little speech. I started by thanking the people who had welcomed me, so to speak, into the Agile community back in 2002 at the XP conference in Sardinia. Many were in the room. Then I said more or less the following: "It's always hard explaining to my neighbours, to folks I met at parties, and so on, what this Agile thing is that takes up most of my time and has become a full-time job. Lately I ask people if they've used a computer; I ask them if they've been frustrated and angry with it. Usually they say yes. Then I say that we're working to improve the software profession, so that these things eventually become history. That seems to be a pretty good explanation, judging by the encouraging words I get now. For me this is what Agile is primarily about: working to become a profession that people respect, like doctors, firemen or astronauts." Well, that was my speech. In retrospect I might want to add that it takes more than software developers to build software, so there are many roles in our profession for which I would also like more recognition as professionals. Testers, "customers" (product owners, if you prefer), and so on.
The Gordon Pask award is one way for the Agile community to say, "Listen to what these people say Agile is about, and look at what they do about it." It is intended for people who don't already have "star" status, like Kent Beck; for people who are doing things within Agile that seem to matter and who we'd like to have more recognition, so that they will matter a bit more.
You can help define what Agile stands for: look around you at who is doing stuff that you think moves Agile in the right direction, and nominate them for the Gordon Pask award. Just send an email to pask-nominations(at)agilealliance.org .
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