I am happy to announce that we have selected the charities for the 2011 Northwest Arkansas GiveCamp. The full list of charities and non-profits can be found on the Northwest Arkansas GiveCamp site located at http://nwagivecamp.org.
We are still in need of event staff and team volunteers. If you are intersted please see the information on the site and register.
I have confirmed I will be attending and speaking that the Houston TechFest 2010 on October 9th, 2010. I will be presenting my Planning Poker session, recording interviews for User Group Radio and of course talking community any chance I get.
I am also working with Zain Naboulsi about organizing a Community Leadership Town Hall Meeting the night before the conference. This will be a dinner with an open space/fish bowl style discussion on creating, building, and sustaining community.
Looks like the Houston TechFest site hasn’t bee updated yet so here is the info on my session:
Estimate Your Requirements with Planning Poker
Planning Poker is a consensus-based estimation technique for estimating, mostly used to estimate effort or relative size of tasks in software development . It is a variation of the Wideband Delphi method. In this session you will learn not only what planning poker is but how to facilitate it with your team. Using Planning Poker to estimate task on your project is not only accurate its fun.
Just a quick not to let anyone, like myself, interested in Software Craftsmanship know about Software Craftsmanship North America conference on October 15-16, 2010 in Chicago, IL. I wish I had noticed this about 2 weeks ago when we had to turn in training budget for the next year so I could go.
There are going to be some awesome speakers; Cory Haines, Dave Hoover, Micah Martin, Angelique Martin, Paul Pagel, Kevin Taylor and more.
If you are new to Software Craftsmanship listen to a great discussion about it on the Virtual Alt Net recording of the April, 6, 2010 with Uncle Bob.
A strange thing happened this past week at the Northwest Arkansas TechFest, several of us were sitting around in the speaker room talking about conferences and trying to determine if Microsoft would be have a Professional Developer Conference (PDC) this year. News from our Microsoft Developer Evangelist was that they had been told no PDC this year. We also had several discussions about what would be talked about, I mean there doesn’t seem to be that much new stuff scheduled to ship.
Well it looks like there will be a Microsoft PDC 2010, Chris Koenig just announced it on his blog “Microsoft PDC 2010”.
Looking at the Microsoft PDC 10 site I noticed the same things that Chris points out in his blog post that differs from previous PDCs.
- Held on Microsoft Campus
- 2 days instead of 3
- Registration price is reduced to $1,000
I guess if Microsoft can host a huge number of MVPs for a summit once a year, they should be able to host this easily enough. Actually will probably be easier.
Look like the focus is going to be on “Cloud Services, Phone, Tools & Technologies, Internet Explorer and Gaming”.
Keep checking on the main site http://microsoftpdc.com for more information.
The Northwest Arkansas .NET User Group is planning some awesome events for the coming year. To be able to get these events of the ground we need to get together and work on the websites. If you have some time pack up your laptop and join us on July 11th, from noon till whenever for an evening of fun and code where we will get started working on sites for the Northwest Arkansas Give Camp and Northwest Arkansas Community Camp events.
If you plan on showing up let me know by registering.