Lightning Talks
We just ran our first internal lightning talk session.
Another idea from the session on creative idea sharing that Douglas Squirrel (from youDevise) ran at XPDay, was to use lightning talks for internal information sharing.
In case you're not familiar with the idea, you create a number of 5 minute slots, draw up a blank schedule on a whiteboard, and let people fill it in. You might need to chase people for the initial ideas, and stand up yourself and do a slot, but we found that wasn't necessary.
I figured that 6 slots was about right to start with, scheduled them into our lunch break, and they soon filled up.
Gwyn started by telling everyone about the agile practices that he and I picked up on a recent meeting with Harvey Wheaton (from Supermassive Games).
Max gave a quick overview of the architecture he has introduced by refactoring our Mandays tool, preparing it for version two.
Mark spoke about his experiences writing documentation for the Dragonfly gem he has recently published.
Ben gave a controversial talk about why he hates using RSpec.
Paul gave everyone an overview of the client project he is working on, so that everyone is familiar with the site, and where the client wants it to go.
Finally I presented a summary of the comments and thoughts that were discussed in the creative ideas sharing session, about rotating between pairs, and rotating pairs between projects.
We closed the session with a show of hand vote on who wants to know more about each subject. It looks like we will think and talk a lot more about documentation tools, and pair rotation.