innoQ Event in Edinburgh

Have I mentioned that I love Open Space? Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. But the truth of the matter is, I really do love open space.

I have been helping with the organization and moderation of the past few innoQ open space events and I really enjoy it. I am trying to organize an Open Space conference with the rheinJUG right now, and hopefully that will be a success too.

Essentially, the participants of the event are the ones who put together the program for the event. It all begins with the marketplace where everybody has the opportunity to fill the agenda with the topics that they want to talk about. Making the marketplace is always a lot of fun.

Marketplace

I used this event to practice some graphic recording and moderating in different sessions. A lot of the results were things that are only of interest to my company, so I’m not putting them on my blog. However, there were two sessions that I recorded that can be published.

Firstly, my awesome colleage Lucas Dohmen introduced the Faucet asset pipeline, which is an open source project that some of my colleagues have been working on. Here is the sketchnote of that:

Faucet

The great Jan Stępień also gave an amazing talk about how to filter spam using machine learning. My sketch is here:

Spam and Rabbits

I also managed to get my colleage Martin Kühl to explain the State monad to me. He helped me to figure out how the bind and return functions for the state, reader, and writer monads would look like in Clojure. After that, I also decided I would try to do the same for the identity monad. The flip charts for that are here:

Monads in Clojure Monads in Clojure Monads in Clojure

I also did one session about my talk “The Enemy of the State” which I am going to give at the TopConf Düsseldorf. For the talk, I used an example of a cookie jar to talk about state. I also very helpfully got a lot of implementations of the cookie jar in different languages. After the talk, I got some feedback from colleages. I am not sure how understandable it is in this format if you didn’t hear the talk, but here it is:

Enemy of the State Feedback Enemy of the State Feedback

All in all, I thought it was a very successful event! My colleages also agreed. This is the feedback we collected during the closing round of the Open Space:

Closing Feedback