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LA Unconference December 2014

December is always a very exciting time of the year when engineers gather in our LA office to discuss, work and have fun together. It is a time for reflection and to review what we have accomplished over the past year.

Like a big family whose members meet after a long time, we start with a big event which helps foster communication, breaks the ice, welcomes our new colleagues and sets up a space to discuss about interesting topics.  The engineering gathering started with an Unconference held in Liferay HQ with roughly 100 people in attendance. I was a facilitator and to be honest, the large number of attendants scared me. In these type of events there are hardly any rules, and there is no previous agenda!

everything seemed to be set up for failure, so the anxiety began to build up as we got closer to the event. Would it be possible that a hundred engineers come to an agreement on what topics they want to discuss?

From our previous experiences with this type of events, we introduced two recommendations to help people building the schedule:

• Nobody starts talking before people are done writing their topics

• If possible, classify your session under one of the proposed categories.

After the introduction, we gave engineers about 15 minutes to write down their topics in the cards. Once they all were finished, they were invited to go to the center of the circle, pick up the mic and start promoting and convincing people to attend to their session. I still remember Ray promoting one of his sessions in a pretty enthusiastic way, it was great!! Afterwards they walked to the wall where the schedule grid was and choose a sticker to tag (classify) their session before allocating it in a time slot in the grid.

The proposed categories were:

• Modularization (red color sticker)

• Front end  (yellow color sticker)

• QA/Testing  (blue color sticker)

• Third party technologies (orange color sticker)

• Communication and Organization  (green color sticker)

• Demos (two orange color stickers)

The sticker was not mandatory if the topic didn’t fit in any of the categories. The goal was to help avoid many sessions of related topics at the same time and also make it easier to find sessions of the topics anyone was interested in.

We avoided being messy when building the agenda because most of the people were listening when others were convincing them to attend to their topics which worked out really great. We had expected category stickers to facilitate the visual identification of topics regarding the same category, so that engineers could talk and put topics together in the same session, but they turned out to not be so useful for that. However we have some ideas for improvements and will try again next time :-)

And finally we got the agenda for the day:

To be entirely honest, I am amazed everytime I see these guys in action. How incredible is their ability to self-organize? How could I be nervous?

And we were ready to go, six sessions distributed in six different spaces, all ready to share knowledge and collaborate and the best of all, no bored people!!! because engineers were free to leave the conversation at any time when they feel they were not learning or contributing, they could join any other one or just start working.

I really like the freedom that this sort of events provide and how people engage when they are free to choose what to talk or what to do, I even joined a few sessions because I was really interested in them!!

Unconference in numbers:

I did some statistics about the event, because I love numbers and they always give a good idea of what happened:

• 100 people attended the event.

• 35 topics were discussed. The topics and  session’s host can be found at the following document: Unconference Dec 2014 - Session

• 6 hours of continuous talking (6 sessions at the same time)

• Hot topics:

  • The winner in the hot topic category was  “Quality and Testing”:  8 different sessions were based on that topic, from quality in a broad subject to how to test modules with arquillian.

  • 7 sessions were about modularity, topics such as liferay internal architecture, BLADE, or how to make themes more modular were discussed.

  • In the category of communication and organization, there was a total of 4 discussions: how to engage the community or how to improve the use of our own products such as forums or the dev net.

  • Also, several new projects, initiatives, or technologies were introduced such as Liferay Services API, Launchpad, Connect,  Ecmascript 6, Portlet 3.0..

At the end of the meeting, we gathered in a big circle and started a round of feedback. People shared impressions about the day or, really, any specific session and in general it was great! We had around 20 people speak about how good and useful the day was for them.

For those who shy away from speaking in public, we also provided them an opportunity to give us their impression about the event.

So the unconference was over, and I could finally breath. Everything went smooth. But with that being said, there were some aspects I would like to improve, because there is always room for improvement.  

Right after the event, some of the people thanked us (Josh Kuo and me), so now it is the time for me to say Thanks to everybody! Thanks for attending and for being so passionate in what you do everyday.

It is a pleasure to work with you and I am looking forward to the next engineering retreat!!