Visuals Created by Stuart Young.

Why this festival?

We aim to build bridges and capture the various Agile communities across the globe in a huge Community led event for the Month of February 2021 to coincide with 20 years of the Agile Manifesto. The three themes are: Past, Current and Future of Agile and the Agile Communities.

Here are our 9 Festival Principles

1. A Distributed Ecosystem: This is not a conference; it’s an ecosystem having a party!  And it is not anything that is centrally run! (A distributed, self-organized month-long party)
2. Free to Everyone: This is a huge free Festival of events and activities occurring in Feb 2021, created by local groups and organisations across the globe, supported by Community volunteers! This is Especially important in the current financial recession and mass layoffs.
3. Locally Created: Choice of activities rests with the local Agile Community Groups, inclusion diversity and variety are actively encouraged. All this lead locally by our volunteer ambassadors
4. Globally Connected Ambassadors across the globe engaging with local areas to :-
   • Create awareness, so people know
   • Registering local meetups and organisations with the Festival
   • Supporting the creation of activities:
     • Helping With Speakers (VSD will help)
     • Guides for online hosting
     • Code of Conduct
     • Facilitating getting the event recordings – centrally available on Youtube (like Agile TED Talks)
   • Make this really locally led, appropriate to local languages and culture
   • Promote reflection and improvement in the Agile community
5. Accessible and Inclusive Programme Directory:  We will have a Festival Programme Directory listing all of the events, speakers and topics and this will be available to everyone to navigate the events/activities. All events will be:-
   Locally hosted and you register with the local groups and run locally
   Open to everyone
   When the bookings are full, events can be live broadcast or uploaded to Youtube so people can watch
6. Community Funded: We will ask existing organisations, associations and businesses to lend their support. As this is distributed it is likely support will be about providing Access and Social Capital. Supporting organisations will help spread the message on the event and may help with financial support. (We are deliberately trying to limit the need for finance)
7. Volunteer Speaker Powered: We are actively seeking diversity of Agile and Agility Speakers at all levels (we value new ideas and new voices as much as more experienced ones) to register as Volunteer Speakers and that directory will only be available to the Ambassadors to help meetups and organizations across the globe
8. Self navigation – Build Your Own Experience: People will be able to self navigate their festival, do what they want or just watch it for free from the video archive, they can use these videos under creative commons for learning of any kind. Almost infinite options!
9. Long Lasting Friendships: As well as the new relationships and huge new interaction between diverse technical, agile practice, and geographic communities, after the festival we will have a huge resource of recorded material that we will make available for free to anyone who wants to navigate that mass of learning. Also, this may lead to long lasting relationships and a continuing community ecosystem.