Event Schedule
AgileDC 2023 KeyNote Speaker
The Agilists’ Emerging Superpower and Our Planetary Challenge
Lyssa Adkins
DETAILS
Monday, October 23rd @ 9AM
Location
Kellogg Center, on the campus of Gallaudet University. 800 Florida Ave NE, Washington, DC 20002.
2023 Agile DC Speakers
AgileDC 2023 Program Schedule
We have selected speakers for AgileDC 2023. See the the Program Schedule on confengine.
DETAILS
Monday, October 23rd @ 10AM - 5PM
Location
Kellogg Center, on the campus of Gallaudet University. 800 Florida Ave NE, Washington, DC 20002.
Availability
Prior Talks, Speakers, and Presentations Available on Conference Engine.
About Speaker Compensation
As mentioned in the AgileDC Frequently Asked Questions page, speakers for full 45-minute talks receive a free ticket to the conference. Speakers for 10-minute lightning talks receive a discounted ticket. We value your contribution to the program, and are honored that you will take your time and effort to share that with the local Agile community.
We sometimes get questions about why we do not pay speakers, nor pay travel and accommodation expenses for them. Some people see this as discriminatory, as not everyone works for a company that will fund their employees speaking at a conference.
Many of the Agile DC organizers are self-employed and can sympathize. Some of us lose a bit of money when we speak at conferences, but do so for the experience of attending the conference at reduced cost. This can sometimes mean losing out on some conferences because it’s just too expensive to participate.
AgileDC does not pay for travel and accommodation for a couple of reasons.
This is a regional conference, and we assume that the attraction is stronger for both speakers and attendees in the local area. We are amazed and gratified at how far some people will travel at their own expense to speak at Agile DC. Some do it for the marketing publicity. Some do it because it fits with other travel plans. Regardless of the benefits, we welcome everyone to be a part of Agile DC. Bringing in speakers from far away is not, however, central to the vision of Agile DC. We have a lot of local talent that deserves to be heard.
This is a charitable conference. You may hear many conferences say they are non-profit, in that they use all the proceeds to fund the conference and related community gatherings. We do that, also, but we go a step further. The AgileDC conference is run by Agile Philanthropy, an IRS-registered 501(c)(3) Public Charity. All funds in excess of the costs of running the conference are donated to local charities, as chosen by the conference organizers. Let’s face it--there are many with greater needs than the neediest of conference speakers. In 2018 we donated over $70,000 to charities in an attempt to make the world a better place for us all.
We prioritize accessibility for learners. We have purposely kept registration fees more affordable than comparable regional and national conferences in order to allow those who are self-funded to easily attend. It is most important to us to keep the learning opportunities open to as wide of a group as possible.
Our intent is to benefit as many as possible. We hope you will support us in this mission. If you have suggestions on how we can improve, we'd like to hear from you directly. Send us an email at info@agiledc.org.
AgileDC 2023 Program Selection Process
Selecting session proposals for a conference program is a tough job. There are competing interests–speakers who want to present their ideas, companies who want to raise their visibility by having an employee speak, and attendees who want to learn and/or be entertained.
The selection committee wants to satisfy the attendees, and also has an interest in crafting a program that presents information that is both useful and true. Having been a conference reviewer for many years and a number of conferences, I’ve seen my share of people new to a topic, extrapolating from insufficient experience, who propose sessions that sound like a terrible idea from my experience. There is enough misinformation and misleading guidance available on the Internet. If you need more, you can certainly ask ChatGPT.
When filtering out the chaff, it’s too easy to also filter out good information that just happens to be novel or unknown to the reviewers. When selecting known-good speakers offering known-good topics, it’s easy to fall into a rut. I assure you that most reviewers that I’ve known work hard to avoid these subjective biases, to the extent that a human can do so.
For AgileDC 2022 we used the “Powerball” random selection method to choose between submitted sessions. Our process was based on the work of Adam Cronkite of Democracy Research, and Mike Lauer of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is explored in the Revisionist History Podcast: The Powerball Revolution. The rationale is that random selection avoids subjective bias.
At AgileDC, as at NIH, we tempered that unbiased randomness with a filter to loosely judge a proposal’s “sufficiency and appropriateness” for a session at the conference. We try to avoid blatant sales pitches.
This worked well, but I felt that I might be shirking my responsibility as an experienced Agilist and reviewer by relying so heavily on the random selection. This year, we plan to inject a little more subjectivity in the form of “expert’s favorites.” The reviewers on the program committee, while judging sufficiency and appropriateness, will keep an eye out for proposals they think are especially good. We will discuss those at selection time, and perhaps select up to 8 sessions by consensus before continuing with the random selection.
The random selection process will proceed the same as last year. Each proposed speaker will be assigned a random number and then the list will be sorted by that number. The committee will work through that list in that sorted order, choosing one of each speaker’s submissions based on submission preference and on the desire to present a varied and balanced program. Where the committee does not have a clear favorite, they may consult with the speaker to help choose.
If a selected speaker must drop out for some reason, the committee will attempt to fill the slot with the next speaker in the random list.