Swarmteams SPICEs up major conference
10 Oct 2006
1. Luxembourg hosts the Sixth International SPICE Conference
Each year SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination) organises its international conference where software process practitioners get a chance to network and catch up on the latest developments in this exciting area
Organising an event with over 100 delegates converging from countries all over the world can be challenging to say the least!.
This year the organising committee decided to take advantage of using an innovative solution to aid communication and logistics during the performance of the conference.
Taking a leap into the world of ‘bioteaming’, the conference organisers selected Swarmteams as a means to better achieve communication and responsiveness with attendees.
2. A Trinity of Swarms
Three Swarms were set-up with overlapping membership as required:
I - SPICE_Admin allowed the organisers to have a private group messaging channel among themselves.
II - SPICE_Logistics provided a broadcast message channel for all announcements to delegates as a group including:
- Programme changes
- Session reminders
- Social programme reminders (such as the conference dinner, tour and boat trip)
- Circulating conference photos hot off the press
- Conference close-out, thanks and announcing SPICE 2007 in Seoul, Korea
III - SPICE_Feedback provided delegates with a real-time back channel to provide instant feedback on the conference as it happened
3. The Wisdom of Crowds?
As an experiment the conference also used Swarmteams to allow real-time audience participation by mobile and web responses using Swarteams in the keynote talk given by Ken Thompson (Author of Bioteams - www.bioteams.com and Founder of Swarmteams)
Can Software Engineering teams adapt biological principles ?
 The delegates concluded that there was much we can learn from nature in how we manage the software process and that traditional ways of team and management communication can be challenged to good effect in effecting a mature software organisation. Tracking of team ‘signals’ (electronic messages) can be used as leading indicators and pre-requisites of quality work products.
On a topical note, and to encourage audience participation, Ken’s session made a poll of delegates on who was going to win the up-coming soccer world cup. This was an experiment to see how well the approach popularised in the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki applied to sports result predictions.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the conference venue, the delegates overwhelmingly predicted that France would prevail. France did, in fact make the final but lost to Italy (who only received one vote!).
So we concluded that The Wisdom of Crowds is not totally reliable where national pride is at stake!
4. Completely connected
Alec Dorling (InterSPICE, UK), the general chair of the conference, is always on the look out for innovative ways to make the conferences successful.
At the last conference, held in Klagenfurt, Austria, the conference ran an X-event (extra event) for those not able to attend thereby allowing wider access to the event and providing the immediate highlights, news and views ‘Podcasting direct from SPICE 2005’. This was deemed a great success with over 4000 hits on the web site during the two days of the conference
Using Swarmteams at the conference event this year greatly assisted the communication during the conference and provided the conference administration an effective way to share time critical information and urgent requests with the conference delegates.
The use of Swarmteams for audience participation during Ken Thomson’s keynote presentation certainly provided the organisers with a few pre-presentation challenges and nerves; live connection to broadband with wifi connections to partcipants laptops, SMS mobile messages communicating from and between worldwide service providers in real time, keynote presentation delivery from two laptops with live to the internet and the parallel use of two projection screens. A recipe for disaster but surprisingly all went well without a single hitch.
Swarmteams challenged the delegates traditional thinking about teamworking and communication and provided delegates with a real insight about the use of supporting innovate technology.
Conference delegates were really interested to explore the use Swarmteams as a means to network post conference and to provide an opportunity for social and business networking.
According to Alec "Swarmteams certainly lives up to its claim of keeping you ‘completely connected’ and we wish it every success for the future".
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