GeekRetreat Stanford – My Personal Experience and Highlights

18 Jan

Posted by Peter Flynn as Developers Interest, PersonL, Ruby on rails, SCRUM, South Africa, Uncategorized, WWW Site

To summarize – GeekRetreat Stanford completely exceeded my expectations and the organizers ( Heather Ford, Justin Spratt and Eve Dmochowska) deserve special recognition for their vision and approach which achieved such a superb result from such a motley crew of delegates. To expand, read the the rest of this post…So I left late on Friday and only managed to get to (the very awesome) Stanford Valley Lodge in time to make the end of the first session on Friday evening. I was immediately struck by the amount of stuff that had already been written down on the weekend planning wall and the quality of the discussion which was being being facilitated by Heather. The sessions were arranged into three kinds (I may not have the names exactly right): “Talking Heads” where we randomly where assigned to 3 of 10 possible groups facilitated by a volunteer to discuss a topic of their choosing; “Hot Spot” where 10 people each had 5 minutes to present (one way) an idea/topic/concept of their own choosing; and then finally longer slots (I think they were called “Skills Share”) where topical presentations were given in 1 hour slots. Apart from these more formal sessions, there were also plenty of informal times (including a fantastic visit to The Birkenhead Brewery) – and these are perhaps were the most valuable discussions took place – the discussions arising from the other more formal sessions. Highlights for me were:

Andy Volk’s presentation about how his company, DownTempo use the margin generated from their consulting business to generate spin-off products and businesses. I was refreshed to learn about a company with so many similarities to ours, and learn about the ways that they have addressed many of the same challenges we face. I enjoyed his philosophy of preferring to “live in the land of “yes”" which means have a far more open relationship with other organizations with potential or real competitive overlap.
This in-turn inspired some great conversations between some of us who own and operate “overlapping” businesses – conversations we have all agreed to continue with – in this regard, I had excellent conversations with Jarred Cinman, Guy Taylor and Wesley Lynch;
Meeting and chatting to Sheraan Amod (Co-founder of Personera.com – check it out) about the “relentless focus” required to launch a web-based product and the journey he has been on;
Sitting in on a discussion with seasoned Tech journos like Samantha Perry and Ivo Vegter along with a bunch of other great minds while they discussed telecoms advocacy and what the most important issue(s) to address are in 2010;
Learning about the world of “Digital Agency” from Rob Stokes and Wesley Lynch and discovering how different that is to our world where we focus on heavy-lifting web app development consultancy – similar perhaps in terms of some of the “1’s and 0’s” churn out behind the scenes, but entirely different in terms of pre and post sales client engagements, the stakeholders we talk to and the types of conversations we have with customers and the industry at large;
Spontaneous, hilarious live entertainment from Willem van Straaten on Saturday night – and the general craziness of the community;
The international element and more tangible experience of “7 (or less)degrees of separation,” especially highlighted by Stefan Magdalinski, and also Stefan’s demonstration of how the internet can be used to liberate information (…and info wants to be free…)
The discussion about the role (and validity) of the various “ICT Entrepreneurship Initiatives” in South Africa at the moment – with special focus on The Silicon Cape Initiative, GeekRetreat itself and NetProphet;
A look into the excellent product Cognition and a conversation with Patrick Kayton about their journey so far;
A conversation with Andrea Broom and others about the uses of PersonL in the education field (something we had not seen before);
Seeing how many companies are running SCRUM in South Africa;
Steve Vosloo’s “proof of concept” project called “Kontax” showing that kids will read books on a mobile web interface because “something is better than nothing”;
And finally, the general quality of conversation (ok – maybe not all of it – the Birkenhead Black Snake and Tequila supplied by Elan Lohman did its work:) on Saturday night);
And I’m pretty sure I have forgotten some things that I will only think of later…