My immediate need for understanding more about Agile development is that I’m helping to organize the new Reynolds Journalism Inst. News Collaboratory. The point of this effort, as Jason Kristufek recently wrote, is to be a “do tank,” not a think tank, for experimenting with new options for the news business.

That’s why we’re trying to engage in this community people with diverse types of “do” experience — technologists, librarians, entrepreneurs, financiers, advertising and marketing pros, etc. And, yes, journalists too. The point is to actually get people working together to try stuff and share the results, not just to talk about stuff.

The question then becomes: How do you get people to decide on which problems to solve or experiments to try, parse those out into doable chunks, move their efforts forward, and assess results? Rather than try to do this all on the fly, I thought it might be useful to borrow some ideas and practices from Agile development.

For context, here’s the Agile Manifesto, as well as an excerptWikipedia’s current article on Agile:

“Agile methodologies generally promote a project management process that encourages frequent inspection and adaptation, a leadership philosophy that encourages teamwork, self-organization and accountability, a set of engineering best practices that allow for rapid delivery of high-quality software, and a business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals.”

So with that context, here are my live tweets from this discussion (cleaned up a bit). Unless otherwise attributed, all points made here came from Desi McAdam…

More...

Now in the Agile methodologies session, which I hope will help with RJI collaboratory.

There’s a difference between Agile development & utter chaos. But Agile can devolve into chaos.

Agile is a very rigid process. If you don’t stick to the process, things fall apart quickly.

Agile is an iterative process: earlier work gets outdated quickly. Cycles are smaller, iterative, to adapt to change as change happens.

Pair programming is more popular with females — more interactive, cooperative. Keeps you on track, out of rat holes.

In Agile, you have to be disciplined: Organizations and your pair partner must be disciplined. Very accountable.

Pair programming is a wonderful way to do knowledge transfer.

Pair programming improves code quality. If you’re coding and someone’s watching, you’re less likely to do something hacky.

Pair programming is more productive. People don’t generally like to interrupt working pairs. (Interesting!)

Agile also is about sustainable work pace: Don’t burn people out, get the most benefit from coders.

Some companies require some up-front planning, like wireframes or mockups, before throwing Agile development team on it. Do you have a good base?

Agile used in Spot.us development process. David Cohn came to us with wireframes. We started storycarding. Right off bat, we had to prioritize and think about what desired feature could go.

Storycard = definition of a chunk of work. Say what the business value is first. Get client to tell you, helps set priorities

Glitches with Agile: Lack of quality assurance (QA): Developers should be writing test code. Pivotal tracker (popular Agile project management tool) doesn’t address QA.

Rally, other tools do account for QA — but they’re bloated and slow and tedious to use. Simpler configurable tools needed.

Standup meetings: key part of Agile process. Can work in any organization. Very short meeting: everyone stands up, gives recent and current tasks, identifies obstacles.

Agile is hard to do in a distributed environment (workers not in same location). iChat, screen sharing helps. Good manager/developer communication is crucial.

Good Agile stories follow INVEST principles (from Extreme Programming, a related discipline): Independent (self-contained), Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable (you can guess how involved/big it might be), Small, Testable.

ME: I’m liking the story analogy of the Agile process. I think media people will be able to relate to that.

Negotiable = not defining the story in such rigid detail that it can’t be changed.

Desi recommends Liz Keogh as a great resource on thinking about Agile.

ME: The Agile session is incredibly valuable! Desi rocks!!! I needed exactly this info right now!

I’ll be sharing more thoughts on Agile later — but for now here are a couple of takeaways that struck me:

Storycarding reminds me of journalistic news judgment. The process of breaking a project down into tasks that meet invest criteria reminds me how journalists and editors decide which news and information warrant development into a story. Both involve assessing a situation and needs, and matching it with criteria. Both appear to be more like art than than science or rote procedure.

Applying Agile techniques to other fields (such as news and journalism) is itself an experiment that should be handled in clear storycard-like chunks. It may not work, and it certainly would be a culture shift. I think, for cultural reasons this is a strong reason to involve geeks, entrepreneurs, and others in this process — and to team them together with journalists to promote knowledge transfer.

…More thoughts later. But for now, what do you think? Please comment below.

I live-tweeted the sessions I attended, and here is the index to my tweetstreams from each session. I’ll be posting them over the next few days. The ones with live “my tweeks” links are ready to read. The rest, I’m still producing — although in the meantime I’m linking to existing notes posted to She’s Geeky site (where available).

This order does not reflect the order in which the sessions I attended occurred. I’m just posting in an order that makes sense to me. Enjoy.

• Agile Methodologies, led by Desi McAdam of Hashrocket. My tweets, plus Melanie Archer’s notes.
• Getting Past Failure, led by Susan Mernit.
• Making Information Accessible and Available, led by librarians Gail Haspert and Daniela Barbosa. My tweets. Gail’s notes.
• Transparency: Identity Online and In Real Life (IRL), led by Susan Mernit and Ida Rose Sylvester. My tweets coming soon.
• Building Collaborative Communities, led by Margaret Rosas of Quiddities. My tweets coming soon. Other session notes.
• Open Source 101/201, led by Michelle Murrain. My tweets coming soon. Susan Mernit. My tweets coming soon.
• Women Role Models, Mentoring and Leadership, led by Mary Hodder.

…Of course, I couldn’t attend every session — but lots of other attendees took notes too, and plenty of folks tweeted this event using the hashtag ShesGeeky.

I’ve written before about how the culture of traditional journalism tends to be rather insular, self-referential and — increasingly — toxic. This is especially true of the events that journalists typically attend, and the communities with which they typically mix.

Journalists mainly go to conferences specifically about journalism or specifically for journalists. While they also attend other events, this is usually for research or reporting — not to be “part of the crowd.”

…And that, I think, is a huge missed opportunity. Increasingly, community building and team building are becoming core skills for a career in journalism. The fast-shifting news business requires that journalists personally know and be able to work well with technologies, business people, marketers, community organizers, financiers, nonprofits and advocates, and other people from complementary fields. Every profession has its own culture and its own events. Attending these events — not just for aloof observation, but in order to join those communities — can be a great way to expand your career options.

Today and tomorrow I’m attending an event that represents a perfect opportunity to connect with geek culture. It’s She’s Geeky, a periodic “unconference” held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA…

The She’s Geeky site defines the purpose of this event as:

“A neutral, face-to-face gathering space for women who like to geek out. Attendees include women involved in all aspects of technology, including those who like to use geeky tools, not just coders, programmers and engineers. You don’t even have to be from the computer industry. You just have to be a woman who identifies as a geek.

From the perspective of a journalist who wants to connect more with geeks and geek culture, in order to build bridges that can support your journalism and your career, an event like She’s Geeky is especially appealing:

• Accessible. It’s not all going to be about hardcore coding or gadgets. There should be ample discussion at a level that most non-geeks (including journalists) can follow reasonably well.
• Unconference format. Attendees gather at the start of the event to define the topics of the day’s sessions. Also, these sessions are mainly for discussion and sharing, not lectures. This means that if you get there early you can propose a session or play a role in refining a topic. That’s a great way not just to get your own informational needs met, but also to get noticed as someone who wants to actively work with the community.
• Female culture. Most tech conferences are a heavily male playground. This affects not only the topics covered and event structure, but the tone of interaction. In my experience, conferences that are primarily oriented toward women in a given field tend to be more welcoming and less cliquish or hierarchical than events where male culture predominates. This means that even male journalists who are newcomers to tech culture might get more out of an event like She’s Geeky than an uber-geekboy rave like Gnomedex (which is fun, but maybe not for your first stop).

I’ll be live-tweeting She’s Geeky today and tomorrow. Follow me on Twitter, as well as @shesgeeky for the updates. You can also follow the conference hashtag #shesgeeky.

A good resources to find all sorts of upcoming events for various fields is Upcoming. Also, as I wrote earlier, Meetup.com can be your gateway to many local communities that gather on a regular basis.

How are you connecting with other communities and professions — not just as an observer but as a participant? What strategies have you found useful? Please comment below.

(NOTE: I originally posted this article to Poynter’s

But yesterday I saw a particularly compelling video post by Wine 2.0 founder Gary Vaynerchuk: April 3, 2008 is GOOD PEOPLE DAY, pass it on. Take a minute and watch it, it’s short.

…OK, dude, you got me. Here’s my tribute to a particularly positive and powerful community that’s had a good influence on my life and work: Blogher.

Thanks

Lately there’s been a meme going around called the “W list” — a lengthy list of links to high-quality blogs published by women.

As far as I’ve traced it back, the kernel of this movement began with an Aug. 7 post by PR blogger Valeria Maltoni. But the momentum really picked up when my friend and colleague, the noted PR/marketing blogger Toby Bloomberg, christened an expanded version of the list “the W list” on Aug. 16. Since then, the full list of links has been reposted on many blogs around the world.

The W list was Toby’s response to Ad Age’s Power 150, “a ranking of the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world, as developed by marketing executive and blogger, Todd Andrlik.” That list was based mostly on quantitative popularity in Google, Technorati, and Bloglines — and it contained very few blogs by women.

Toby’s laudable aim was to bring much deserved attention and “Google juice” to accomplished female bloggers, many of whom are writing for niche communities and so don’t make the kind of numbers it takes to get on Ad Age’s Power 150. I think that’s crucial in any field, since (especially when you’re talking about blogs for a particular niche or industry), the quality of the content usually is far more important than search engine ranking, site traffic, or number of subscribers.

I’m honored that Toby included me on her W list, and I recognize many fabulous bloggers there that are worth checking out. I definitely don’t mean to trash this effort. However, there is a problem with it: I think it’s become a link farm, which could end up backfiring on the bloggers who post the list of links, and perhaps those who are included on it.

Here’s why I’m raising this red flag…

Earlier this year a similar list-meme of recommended bloggers, 2000 Bloggers, was making the rounds. Instead of a text list with links, this meme featured thumbnail photos of 2000 bloggers of all sorts, assembled into a photo montage with links. Bloggers were encouraged to republish that montage on their sites in order to increase the number of inbound links from around the web to the listed blogs, thus hopefully improving their positioning in search engine results.

Here’s the trouble with that general approach, as I discussed Feb. 6 in The Right Conversation:

“[Because of this meme,] there’s an awful lot of identical cross-linking happening online. And I can see it happening. Every time I check my feed reader (I have several search feeds for my name and URLs, so I can find out when I’m being discussed or linked to online), I see a slew of new links from new people who have posted the 2000 bloggers photomontage.

“Normally, inbound links are a great thing for traffic and search engine placement. And of course, there’s some social networking potential here too. However, tons of identical links from multiple sites might look like link farming to Google and other major search engines.

“Link farming is a problem, since it’s often employed to game the search engines to artificially boost the rankings of involved sites. Since it’s a problem, search engines have devised sophisticated algorithms to identify it.”

In a followup Feb. 7 post, I noted that Technorati had indeed responded to 2000 Bloggers as a link farm — in effect, erasing those links (and their effects) from its index. Since then, 2000 Bloggers appears to have constructively altered its approach to increasing the visibility of lesser-known bloggers.

I’m concerned that mass cross-posting of the W list links might backfire in the same way — which is why I haven’t posted it to Contentious, even though I support its goals and am a fan of many of the bloggers listed there. In my experience, trying to game search engines (regardless of intentions) is always a losing game for all concerned.

On the bright side, there are a couple of other W-list efforts I believe are very constructive and helpful. First of all, there’s now a W-list Facebook group (which I’ve just joined). That’s a great example of working with the intent of an online tool to further your community’s goals.

Also, there’s a W-List wiki, which could eventually have a beneficial effect on female bloggers’ visibility as long as its feed gets distributed to all the major aggregators (Technorati, Google Blog Search, etc.)

What do you think of the W-list? Did you decide to publish it or not, and why? Please comment below.