I'm not sure if I've written about it on my blog yet, but lately I've been organising a lot of simple AgileScotland initiatives which are designed to help people and spread the word. You can read about some of them on AgileScotland.com. The main things are (a) agile clinics - where people who are doing agile can drop in for free and chat with an agile expert for up to an hour, no strings attached, and (b) very cheap, or free "Agile" training aimed at introducing people to Agile or reinforcing the fundamental agile practices to people who are already doing it.
It's the training I want to mention because I think it could be a useful model for others during the recession. I've found a few places where I can get a really expensive, but still good quality, training facilities;' I and my good friend Rob, had spare capacity; we wanted to "spread the Agile word" around Scotland; we know people want to know about Agile, but many of them don't want to pay for it right now. So we booked a room, sent a few emails, made a few announcements and we ended up with 6 folk, who are in jobs, paying £30 each for a spot and 7 people who don't have work (due to the shite economy) coming along for free. Fun was had by all; and they found it useful too. We've had enough interest so far that we can do another 3 or 4 similiarly sized sessions. We don't make money out of it but (a) we enjoy it and (b) people have long memories - if we help them today, maybe they'll be in a position to help us in the future, who knows, who cares?
So I've got this idea roaming around in my head and I can't get rid of it: wouldn't it be great if all the people who've lost work or are others "free" due to the economy - and, sadly, there are quite a few - got together and organised mutually beneficial training each other for when times are better. What if they used the empy rooms in the universities (during the summer months)? What if they managed to run a project that produced something useufl, perhaps for a charity, perhaps open sourse, perhaps even a useufl product? What if they helped each other with interview practice or rewriting their CVs or preparing a business plan? Wouldn't that be great?
so this idea is going around in my head. I'm happy to put my time into upskilling people in Agile for free (though we do limit the numbers to 2 or 3 per business) but I'm too busy to organise this.
So tell me: do you think this is a daft idea? (I have a lot of those - but this one's hard to shake).
