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Come and see Find My Tea pitch to SyncNorwich on 23 November 2021

Paul Grenyer from Paul Grenyer

 


What: Startup Pitches #12 - Find My Tea, Greenr, Scoop & Yakbit

When: Tuesday, November 23, 2021 @ 6:00pm

Where: Access Creative College, 114 Magdalen Street, Norwich

How much: Free

RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/syncnorwich/events/281757681/

Agenda

6.00pm - Arrivals & Networking with Pizza & Beer
6.15pm - Intro
6.30pm - PITCH 1: Find My Tea
6.40pm - PITCH 2: Greenr
6.50pm - PITCH 3: Scoop
7.00pm - PITCH 4: Yakbit
7.10pm - Q&A
7.30pm - Vote for Best Pitch
7.45pm - Networking & Quick Drink
8.00pm - Close

PITCH 1: Find My Tea

Tea made simple

Whether you're looking for loose leaves or tea bags to take home, or a cafe to unwind in with your favourite blend – it's easy. Simply type in your location or postcode, and you'll soon be able to find the shop or cafe serving the tea that touches your tastebuds. Simple.

https://findmytea.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/FindMyTea

Speaker Paul Grenyer is a husband, father, software engineer, metaller, Paul has been writing software for over 35 years and professionally for more than 20. In that time he has worked for and in all sorts of companies from two man startups to world famous investment banks and insurance companies. He has built and run three limited companies, none of which made him a millionaire and two of which threatened his sanity on more than one occasion.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pgrenyer/
https://twitter.com/pjgrenyer

 

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An Exception wrapper suitable for a RESTful API

Tim Pizey from Tim Pizey

User Story

As a third line support engineer

I want to be able to go to the server class that throws an exception reported by a client

So that I do not need to look for the stack trace in the server logs

Example

Client code 

if (responseCode != 200) {
    throw new TaskException(
        "Error occurred while processing the scan response: " + 
        "response code: " + responseCode + 
        " response body: " + responseContent.getResponseBody());
}

Server code 


  if (null != header && header.startsWith(BEARER)) {
        String token = header.substring(BEARER.length()).trim();
        try {
            final Jws jws = Jwts.parser().setSigningKeyResolver(jwtPublicKeyResolver)
                    .setAllowedClockSkewSeconds(3)
                    .parseClaimsJws(token);
        } catch (JwtException ex) {
            String errorMessage = "Invalid JWT token. ";
            setError(httpServletResponse, errorMessage + ex.getMessage());
            return;
        }
    }

This results in the following being reported by the second level support agent monitoring the client logs:

[Error occurred while processing the scan response : response code: 401 response body: Invalid JWT token. Error accessing publickey Api]:

What we, as Third Line Support, want is to know which server class throws the exception, ideally without grepping the code base or opening the server logs.

A better Exception message would be:

[Problem with scan response: status code: 401, body: com.corp.server.validation.JwtValidator.validate() line 72: JWT token Exception: Error accessing Public Key API]

This is the motivation for the StackAwareException, a wrapper exception which adds the class, method and line number of the first element of the wrapped exception's stack trace.

See https://github.com/timp/StackAwareException

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Where are we with models of human learning?

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Learning is an integral part of writing software. What have psychologists figured out about the characteristics of human learning?

A study of memory, published in 1885, kicked off the start of modern psychology research. At the start of the 1900s, learning research was still closely tied to the study of the characteristics of what we now call working memory, e.g., measuring the time taken for subjects to correctly recall sequences of digits, nonsense syllables, words and prose. By the 1930s, learning was a distinct subject in its own right.

What is now known as the power law of learning was first proposed in 1926. Wikipedia is right to use the phrase power law of practice, since it is some measure of practice that appears in the power law of learning equation: T=a+b*P^{-c}, where: T is the time taken to do the task,P is some measure of practice (such as the number of times the subject has performed the task), and a, b, and c are constants fitted to the data.

For the next 70 years some form of power law did a good job of fitting the learning data produced by researchers. Then in 1997 a paper pointed out that researchers were fitting aggregate data (i.e., one equation fitted to all subject data), and that an exponential equation was a better fit to individual subject response times: T=a+b*e^{-cP}. The power law appeared to be the result of aggregating the exponential response performance of multiple subjects; oops.

What is the situation today, 25 years later? Do the subsystems of our brains produce a power law or exponential improvement in performance, with practice?

The problem with answering this question is that both equations can fit the available data quite well, with one being a technically better fit than the other for different datasets. The big difference between the two equations is in their tails, however, it is costly and time-consuming to obtain enough data to distinguish between them in this region.

When discussing learning in my evidence-based software engineering book, I saw no compelling reason to run counter to the widely cited power law, but I did tell readers about the exponential fit issue.

Studies of learnings have tended to use simple tasks; subjects are usually only available for a short time, and many task repetitions are needed to model the impact of learning. Simple tasks tend to be dominated by one primary activity, which means that subjects can focus their learning on this one activity.

Complicated tasks involve many activities, each potentially providing distinct learning opportunities. Which activities will a subject focus on improving, will the performance on one activity improve faster than others, will the approach chosen for one activity limit the performance on a second activity?

For a complicated task, the change in performance with amount of practice could be a lot more complicated than a single power law/exponential equation, e.g., there may be multiple equations with each associated with one or more activities.

In the previous paragraph, I was careful to say “could be a lot more complicated”. This is because the few datasets of organizational learning show a power law performance improvement, e.g., from 1936 we have the most cited study Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes, and the less well known but more interesting Liberty shipbuilding from the 1940s.

If the performance of something involving multiple people performing many distinct activities follows a power law improvement with practice, then the performance of an individual carrying out a complicated task might follow a simple equation; perhaps the combined form of many distinct simple learning activities is a simple equation.

Researchers are now proposing more complicated models of learning, along with fitting them to existing learning datasets.

Which equation should software developers use to model the learning process?

I continue to use a power law. The mathematics tend to be straight-forward, and it often gives an answer that is good enough (because the data fitted contains lots of variance). If it turned out that an exponential would be easier to work with, I would be happy to switch. Unless there is a lot of data in the tail, the difference between power law/exponent is usually not worth worrying about.

There are situations where I have failed to successfully add a learning (power law) component to a model. Was this because there was no learning present, or was the learning not well-fitted by a power law? I don’t know, and I cannot think of an alternative equation that might work, for these cases.

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How large an impact does social conformity have on estimates?

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

People experience social pressure to conform to group norms. How big an impact might social pressure have on a developer’s estimate of the effort needed to implement some functionality?

If a manager suggests that the effort likely to be required is large/small, I would expect a developer to respond accordingly (even if the manager is thought to be incompetent; people like to keep their boss happy). Of course, customer opinions are also likely to have an impact, but what about fellow team members, or even the receptionist. Until somebody runs the experiments, we are going to have to do with non-software related tasks.

A study by Molleman, Kurversa, and van den Bos asked subjects (102 workers on Mechanical Turk) to estimate the number of animals in an image (which contained between 50 and 100 ants, flamingos, bees, cranes or crickets). Subjects were given 30 seconds to respond, and after typing their answer they were told that “another participant had estimated X“, and given 45 seconds to give a second estimate. The ‘social pressure’ estimate, X, was chosen to be around 15-25% larger/smaller than the estimate given (values from a previous experiment were randomly selected).

The plot below shows the number of second estimates where there was a given percentage change between the first and second estimates, red line is a loess fit; the formula used is {secondEstimate-firstEstimate}/{SocialEstimate-firstEstimate} (code+data):

Number of second estimates having a given change in the first estimate towards social estimate.

Around 25% of second estimates were unchanged, and 2% were changed to equal the social estimate. In two cases the second estimate was less than the first, and in eleven cases it was larger than the social estimate. Both the mean and median for shift towards the social estimate were just over 30% of the difference between the first estimate and the social estimate.

As with previous estimating studies, a few round numbers were often chosen. I was interested in finding out what impact the use of a round number value for the first estimate, or the social estimate, might have on the change in estimated value. The best regression model I could find showed that if the first estimate was exactly divisible by 5 (or 10), then the second estimate was likely to be around 5% larger. In fact divisible-by-5 was the only variable that had any predictive power.

My initial hypothesis was that the act of choosing a round numbers is an expression of uncertainty, and that this uncertainty increases the impact of the social estimate (when making the second estimate). An analysis of later experiments suggested that this pattern was illusionary (see below).

Modelling estimate values, rather than their differences, the equation: secondEstimate approx firstEstimate^{0.6}*SocialEstimate^{0.3} explains nearly all the variance present in the data.

Two weeks after the first experiment, all 102 subjects were asked to repeat the experiment (they each saw the same images, in the same order, and social estimates as in the first study); 69 subjects participated. Nine months after the first experiment, subjects were asked to repeat the experiment again; 47 subjects participated, again with each subject seeing the same images in the same order, and social estimates. Thirty-five subjects participated in all three experiments.

To what extent were subjects consistently influenced by the social estimate, across three identical sessions? The Pearson correlation coefficient between both the first/second experiment, and the first/third experiment, was around 0.6.

The impact of round numbers was completely different, i.e., no impact on the second, and a -7% impact on the third (i.e., a reduced change). So much for my initial hypothesis.

The exponents in the above equation did not change much for the data from the second and third reruns of the experiment.

The variability in the social estimates used in these experiments, involving image contents, differs from software estimates in that they were only 12-25% different from the first estimate. Software estimates often differ by significantly larger amounts (in fact, a 12% difference would probably be taken as agreement).

With some teams, people meet to thrash out a team estimate. Data is sometimes available on the final estimate, but data on the starting values is very hard to come by. Pointers to experiments where social estimates are significantly different (i.e., greater than 50%) from the ones given by subjects welcome.

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A Kutta Above The Rest – a.k.

a.k. from thus spake a.k.

We have recently been looking at ordinary differential equations, or ODEs, which relate the derivatives of one variable with respect to another to them with a function so that we cannot solve them with plain integration. Whilst there are a number of tricks for solving such equations if they have very specific forms, we typically have to resort to approximation algorithms such as the Euler method, with first order errors, and the midpoint method, with second order errors.
In this post we shall see that these are both examples of a general class of algorithms that can be accurate to still greater orders of magnitude.
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What are the first steps in setting OKRs?

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly

“What do you see as the first steps in setting OKRs?”

I’d like to share my answer to this question, it came as a follow up to a presented “Reawakening Agile with OKRs” to a company last week. This is also an opportunity to expand my thinking.

First we need to make some assumptions and decide policies.

I’m going to assume that the team know what OKRs are, why they are being introduced and what is expected of them in setting OKRs. So, if this assumption does not hold true then before you set the OKRs establish some shared understanding on these points. Perhaps get an introduction to OKRs for the team. (I’ve started work on another video tutorial series, an introduction to OKRs and agile.) Next get some guidance from those suggesting the team use OKRs on what they expect.

I’m sorry to say I hear of plenty of cases were these things don’t happen. Teams are told: “thou shalt use OKRs.”

It would also help if those suggesting OKRs have spelt out what they see as success (100% of OKRs complete? 70%? Or, as I prefer: benefit delivered.) But you know what? If you don’t know this you can clarify it later, nice to know in advance but in a pinch, not essential.

Next I suggest Think Team – I’m skeptical about individual OKRs so don’t set OKRs on anything smaller than a team level. While it might help if the “next level up” set OKRs first if the team start first then the team clearly own the OKRs. So, while there are advantages to knowing the priorities higher up there are also advantages to taking the initiative.

If you want to set some kind of individual objectives then my advice is: wait while you learn. Get some experience at the team level with OKRs before thinking about individual goals. Or perhaps, for the first two quarters make everyone’s individual goal “learn how to work with OKRs by working with OKRs.”

It will also help if you have some idea of how your OKRs are going to line up against any backlog you have. Are the OKRs reverse engineered from the backlog? Or do the OKRs have priority over the backlog? Or, as I suggest, use OKRs as a story generating machine instead of having a backlog?

Similarly, if you team needs to “keep the lights on” and do “business as usual” stuff in addition to OKRs you need to know in advance. That will soak up capacity. So how do you reflect that in your OKRs? – in Succeeding with OKRs in Agile I suggest a OKR-Zero for this type of stuff.

Now to set OKRs I suggest at least two meetings – and preferably not too many more. The first meeting is a drafting meeting. You might think of it as a big brainstorm. Get ideas out on the table, talk about priorities. Aim to get a rough draft of some candidate OKRs.

Before that first drafting meeting someone – Team Leader, Manager, Scrum Master, Agile Coach, whoever – needs to confirm what the timeline is. Are the OKRs to run over 13 weeks? – or is it Christmas so this a 15 week quarter? Or maybe you only have 10 weeks this time. The deadlines are important. Don’t plan OKRs without knowing when the first and last days of the cycle are.

It helps if team members have given a little pre-thought to what they would like to see in the OKRs. Now I don’t want a lot of pre-work. And I especially don’t want lots of planning because that a) detracts from they current cycle and b) potentially limits ambition when setting the OKRs. Still a little forethought – think of it like writing your Christmas list.

This suggestion is particularly important to the Product Owner. Since team team are aiming to delivery benefits to others (customers, users, stakeholder, whoever) it is natural that the Product Owner takes a lead in drafting meetings. Whatever title you give this person this is the person who is charged with listening to customer requests, understanding non-customer users, liaising with stakeholders and understanding the business/product strategy and knowing what would be beneficial to who. So it makes sense for this person to have plenty of ideas on what to do.

In the run up to OKR setting is Product Owners need to bring all their homework together and decide what outcomes they would like. The Product Owner needs to present this thinking to the team in OKRs setting and work with the other team members to craft OKRs which reflect those asks. Most importantly of all, they have to understand the implications when some items don’t make the cut.

Thus the Product Owner will walk into the OKR planning meeting with the longest Christmas wish-list of any team member. But they will not get everything on that list, far from it.

Once you have your draft OKRs take a break. At least an overnight break, or maybe a few days.

Do any more homework that is needed (e.g. check requests with customers, show draft to partner teams and managers for feedback, check availability or timelines of people or equipment that might expect to need, etc.)

The second meeting is there to firm up the draft. Ideally after some reflection and some homework everything in the draft looks good, all you need to do is tighten it up and declare it final.

But there is every chance your draft contained six desirable objectives and it needs some reflection and some homework before you can reduce it to three. It may also be that that homework turns up a problem, a priority that had not been appreciated or a block that wasn’t foreseen. In which case you need to revisit the draft.

Setting OKRs inevitably means making choice about what will be done and what will not be done. I’ve heard of teams who have “do not do” lists in parallel with OKRs. This is because OKRs implement strategy and if the strategy is lacking or unclear then OKRs will make that clear, and hopefully seed a conversation.

Enough for now. I hope you found that interesting. If anyone out there has any more questions about OKRs please let me know and I’ll see if I can answer them here.

Subscribe and download Continuous Digital for free

Child at steps in image Jukan Tateisi in Unsplash.

The post What are the first steps in setting OKRs? appeared first on Allan Kelly.

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What are the first steps in setting OKRs?

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly

“What do you see as the first steps in setting OKRs?”

After delivering my “Reawakening Agile with OKRs” presentation to an internal company group the other day and got this question as a follow up afterwards. As I thought it would be worth sharing my reply with more readers, which is also an opportunity to expand my thinking.

First we need to make some assumptions and decide policies.

I’m going to assume that the team know what OKRs are, why they are being introduced and what is expected of them in setting OKRs. So, if this assumption does not hold true then before you set the OKRs establish some shared understanding on these points. Perhaps get an introduction to OKRs for the team. (I’ve started work on another video tutorial series, an introduction to OKRs and agile.) Next get some guidance from those suggesting the team use OKRs on what they expect.

I’m sorry to say I hear of plenty of cases were these things don’t happen. Teams are told: “thou shalt use OKRs.”

It would also help if those suggesting OKRs have spelt out what they see as success (100% of OKRs complete? 70%? Or, as I prefer: benefit delivered.) But you know what? If you don’t know this you can clarify it later, nice to know in advance but in a pinch, not essential.

Next I suggest Think Team – I’m skeptical about individual OKRs so don’t set OKRs on anything smaller than a team level. While it might help if the “next level up” set OKRs first if the team start first then the team clearly own the OKRs. So, while there are advantages to knowing the priorities higher up there are also advantages to taking the initiative.

If you want to set some kind of individual objectives then my advice is: wait while you learn. Get some experience at the team level with OKRs before thinking about individual goals. Or perhaps, for the first two quarters make everyone’s individual goal “learn how to work with OKRs by working with OKRs.”

It will also help if you have some idea of how your OKRs are going to line up against any backlog you have. Are the OKRs reverse engineered from the backlog? Or do the OKRs have priority over the backlog? Or, as I suggest, use OKRs as a story generating machine instead of having a backlog?

Similarly, if you team needs to “keep the lights on” and do “business as usual” stuff in addition to OKRs you need to know in advance. That will soak up capacity. So how do you reflect that in your OKRs? – in Succeeding with OKRs in Agile I suggest a OKR-Zero for this type of stuff.

Now to set OKRs I suggest at least two meetings – and preferably not too many more. The first meeting is a drafting meeting. You might think of it as a big brainstorm. Get ideas out on the table, talk about priorities. Aim to get a rough draft of some candidate OKRs.

Before that first drafting meeting someone – Team Leader, Manager, Scrum Master, Agile Coach, whoever – needs to confirm what the timeline is. Are the OKRs to run over 13 weeks? – or is it Christmas so this a 15 week quarter? Or maybe you only have 10 weeks this time. The deadlines are important. Don’t plan OKRs without knowing when the first and last days of the cycle are.

It helps if team members have given a little pre-thought to what they would like to see in the OKRs. Now I don’t want a lot of pre-work. And I especially don’t want lots of planning because that a) detracts from they current cycle and b) potentially limits ambition when setting the OKRs. Still a little forethought – think of it like writing your Christmas list.

This suggestion is particularly important to the Product Owner. Since team team are aiming to delivery benefits to others (customers, users, stakeholder, whoever) it is natural that the Product Owner takes a lead in drafting meetings. Whatever title you give this person this is the person who is charged with listening to customer requests, understanding non-customer users, liaising with stakeholders and understanding the business/product strategy and knowing what would be beneficial to who. So it makes sense for this person to have plenty of ideas on what to do.

In the run up to OKR setting is Product Owners need to bring all their homework together and decide what outcomes they would like. The Product Owner needs to present this thinking to the team in OKRs setting and work with the other team members to craft OKRs which reflect those asks. Most importantly of all, they have to understand the implications when some items don’t make the cut.

Thus the Product Owner will walk into the OKR planning meeting with the longest Christmas wish-list of any team member. But they will not get everything on that list, far from it.

Once you have your draft OKRs take a break. At least an overnight break, or maybe a few days.

Do any more homework that is needed (e.g. check requests with customers, show draft to partner teams and managers for feedback, check availability or timelines of people or equipment that might expect to need, etc.)

The second meeting is there to firm up the draft. Ideally after some reflection and some homework everything in the draft looks good, all you need to do is tighten it up and declare it final.

But there is every chance your draft contained six desirable objectives and it needs some reflection and some homework before you can reduce it to three. It may also be that that homework turns up a problem, a priority that had not been appreciated or a block that wasn’t foreseen. In which case you need to revisit the draft.

Setting OKRs inevitably means making choice about what will be done and what will not be done. I’ve heard of teams who have “do not do” lists in parallel with OKRs. This is because OKRs implement strategy and if the strategy is lacking or unclear then OKRs will make that clear, and hopefully seed a conversation.

Enough for now. I hope you found that interesting. If anyone out there has any more questions about OKRs please let me know and I’ll see if I can answer them here.

Subscribe and download Continuous Digital for free

Child at steps in image Jukan Tateisi in Unsplash.

The post What are the first steps in setting OKRs? appeared first on Allan Kelly.

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Why I worry about the future of conference speakers

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly

I speak at a lot of conferences and meet-ups, too many. I shouldn’t complain I’ve got books to sell! I’ve also been involved in organizing many conferences – ACCU, EuroPLoP and Agile on the Beach for the last 10 years. There are some trends emerging which worry me and I want to record. So not my usual blog post but I hope this will interest a few people.

Now so many presentations are done remotely I can speak to groups all over the world, last week I spoke to an internal company group in Florida and a couple of months ago to a meet-up in Sydney. I say Florida and Sydney but the attendees were from all over the world, Florida was just the home of the company and Sydney were the group physically met before you-know-what happened.

Increasingly “big name” speakers – maybe me, certainly people bigger than me, people with serious book sales and name recognition in the tech/agile community – are turning up at local meetings and small conferences which are now online. That is good because these groups get to hear directly from people with big ideas.

But, the fact that the big names (and here I probably include myself) are speaking to such groups means others aren’t. In particular local people, new voices, people just starting on the speaking circuit or people who will probably only ever speak to a few events organised by people they know.

My worry is that as more events move online we are perpetuating the winner-take-all culture and making it harder for new people to get started.

Arguably that is offset by fact that more conferences are reviewing submissions anonymously. However I’m not sure anonymous review is a good thing. As a reviewer I normally have two pieces of information: the talk description and the bio of the submitter. I’m looking for an interesting talk and an interesting speaker. Without the bio I only have the talk description to go on. If I select a big name I know I’m selecting a name, when I’m reviewing someone I don’t know I think of them differently.

Consequently reviews are going to favour those who can write stronger, better, descriptions. It may be naturally talented writers, or those who have had the chance to hone the description over previous submissions and presentations. Again favouring the established speakers.

Adding to that is the fact that some speakers work for companies who will help them prepare talks and descriptions. This is more likely in consultancies – or those successful enough to pay for professional help. One comment I heard from conference attendees regularly is that they prefer to hear from non-consultants, those doing actual work, rather than consultants who may have a service to sell. (There are more consultants on the speaking circuit than non-consultants because they have more time and greater motivation to be seen speaking.)

So while well intentioned anonymous review may end up having the opposite effect of that intended.

Next I’m worried about the increased use of online submission systems which create a common pool of speakers – I’ve thought about this long and hard because I looked into this when developing Mimas years ago.

At first this looks great for speakers because they can easily submit too many different conferences. It is good for conferences too because it simplifies submission and increases the pool of speakers. But again this can back-fire.

I once shared a taxi with a speaker whose next conference was in South Africa. He had never heard of the conference but an online system prompted him to submit and guess what, he was accepted! Great but…

As a conference organizer I’ve had to manage over 300 submissions for less than 40 speaking slots. To do the submitters justice requires a lot of review work. A 1:8 ratio is extreme, most conferences it is closer to 1:3 or 1:4. How many conferences can do that?

The last year I ran Agile on the Beach reviews I had over 50 reviewers. That itself makes more work. How many conferences can handle that? Some conferences don’t even have that many attendees.

I used two review rounds, again more work.

And, to be honest, if I have 30 submissions to review, the one I review first will get more thought than the one I review last. Again those who can craft a good description are more likely to get through.

So, common, pooled, online submission systems will increase the number of speakers. Less work for speakers makes more work for organisers. Either conferences will need to invest more in reviewing work or they will end up taking the people they recognise when the cloak of anonymity is raised.

And how are new speakers to improve if they don’t get selected?

Very very few conferences give feedback on submissions to those who submit and are not selected. And as the number of submissions rises the work needed to give feedback also rises. (Particularly since raw comments from reviewers often contradict.)

(Perhaps the thing I am most proud of about Agile on the Beach is that I gave feedback to everyone who submitted. That came at a cost to the conference, and even more, at a cost to me. Ultimately I had to write Mimas to do what I wanted to do and that took a lot more work than I was ever prepared to admit to myself.)

Another side-effect of common submission systems is that conferences organisers have easy access to alternative speakers. There has always been a bottomless pit of people wanting to speak but now they are easy to find. This further reduces the speakers power to ask for travel costs, let alone actual payment. Few speakers get paid for speaking at conferences or meet-ups, with luck the organiser can pay travel costs. This already means those who are successful and can afford the time, and travel costs, are at an advantage. (And again favours consultants for whom speaking is marketing. Consultancies may actively encourage their people to speak, while work-a-day companies are frequently less than keen on employees taking time away from work.)

All-in-all I think well intentioned moves (online talks, anonymous review and pooled submmision platforms) are actually making it harder for new voices to get heard. As so often happens in technology the winners win more and a greater divide opens up.

I don’t know what the answers are. Maybe my concerns are misplaced. But I worry.

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The post Why I worry about the future of conference speakers appeared first on Allan Kelly.

Posted on

Why I worry about the future of conference speakers

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly

I speak at a lot of conferences and meet-ups, too many. I shouldn’t complain I’ve got books to sell! I’ve also been involved in organizing many conferences – ACCU, EuroPLoP and Agile on the Beach for the last 10 years. There are some trends emerging which worry me and I want to record. So not my usual blog post but I hope this will interest a few people.

Now so many presentations are done remotely I can speak to groups all over the world, last week I spoke to an internal company group in Florida and a couple of months ago to a meet-up in Sydney. I say Florida and Sydney but the attendees were from all over the world, Florida was just the home of the company and Sydney were the group physically met before you-know-what happened.

Increasingly “big name” speakers – maybe me, certainly people bigger than me, people with serious book sales and name recognition in the tech/agile community – are turning up at local meetings and small conferences which are now online. That is good because these groups get to hear directly from people with big ideas.

But, the fact that the big names (and here I probably include myself) are speaking to such groups means others aren’t. In particular local people, new voices, people just starting on the speaking circuit or people who will probably only ever speak to a few events organised by people they know.

My worry is that as more events move online we are perpetuating the winner-take-all culture and making it harder for new people to get started.

Arguably that is offset by fact that more conferences are reviewing submissions anonymously. However I’m not sure anonymous review is a good thing. As a reviewer I normally have two pieces of information: the talk description and the bio of the submitter. I’m looking for an interesting talk and an interesting speaker. Without the bio I only have the talk description to go on. If I select a big name I know I’m selecting a name, when I’m reviewing someone I don’t know I think of them differently.

Consequently reviews are going to favour those who can write stronger, better, descriptions. It may be naturally talented writers, or those who have had the chance to hone the description over previous submissions and presentations. Again favouring the established speakers.

Adding to that is the fact that some speakers work for companies who will help them prepare talks and descriptions. This is more likely in consultancies – or those successful enough to pay for professional help. One comment I heard from conference attendees regularly is that they prefer to hear from non-consultants, those doing actual work, rather than consultants who may have a service to sell. (There are more consultants on the speaking circuit than non-consultants because they have more time and greater motivation to be seen speaking.)

So while well intentioned anonymous review may end up having the opposite effect of that intended.

Next I’m worried about the increased use of online submission systems which create a common pool of speakers – I’ve thought about this long and hard because I looked into this when developing Mimas years ago.

At first this looks great for speakers because they can easily submit too many different conferences. It is good for conferences too because it simplifies submission and increases the pool of speakers. But again this can back-fire.

I once shared a taxi with a speaker whose next conference was in South Africa. He had never heard of the conference but an online system prompted him to submit and guess what, he was accepted! Great but…

As a conference organizer I’ve had to manage over 300 submissions for less than 40 speaking slots. To do the submitters justice requires a lot of review work. A 1:8 ratio is extreme, most conferences it is closer to 1:3 or 1:4. How many conferences can do that?

The last year I ran Agile on the Beach reviews I had over 50 reviewers. That itself makes more work. How many conferences can handle that? Some conferences don’t even have that many attendees.

I used two review rounds, again more work.

And, to be honest, if I have 30 submissions to review, the one I review first will get more thought than the one I review last. Again those who can craft a good description are more likely to get through.

So, common, pooled, online submission systems will increase the number of speakers. Less work for speakers makes more work for organisers. Either conferences will need to invest more in reviewing work or they will end up taking the people they recognise when the cloak of anonymity is raised.

And how are new speakers to improve if they don’t get selected?

Very very few conferences give feedback on submissions to those who submit and are not selected. And as the number of submissions rises the work needed to give feedback also rises. (Particularly since raw comments from reviewers often contradict.)

(Perhaps the thing I am most proud of about Agile on the Beach is that I gave feedback to everyone who submitted. That came at a cost to the conference, and even more, at a cost to me. Ultimately I had to write Mimas to do what I wanted to do and that took a lot more work than I was ever prepared to admit to myself.)

Another side-effect of common submission systems is that conferences organisers have easy access to alternative speakers. There has always been a bottomless pit of people wanting to speak but now they are easy to find. This further reduces the speakers power to ask for travel costs, let alone actual payment. Few speakers get paid for speaking at conferences or meet-ups, with luck the organiser can pay travel costs. This already means those who are successful and can afford the time, and travel costs, are at an advantage. (And again favours consultants for whom speaking is marketing. Consultancies may actively encourage their people to speak, while work-a-day companies are frequently less than keen on employees taking time away from work.)

All-in-all I think well intentioned moves (online talks, anonymous review and pooled submmision platforms) are actually making it harder for new voices to get heard. As so often happens in technology the winners win more and a greater divide opens up.

I don’t know what the answers are. Maybe my concerns are misplaced. But I worry.

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