With just a couple of days to go, pressure is mounting for organizers and presenters (not to mention Programming with the Stars contestants).

Anyway, it is time you learn about the conference wiki.

The conference wiki is a place that all participants to the conference are free to use. Please request for write access on the site.

Since it for you to provide the content, there isn’t much so far. However, you’ll find links to pages that talk about the conference, references to our presence on twitter, flickr and blogs, etc.

At Agile 2009, on Tuesday evening, August 25 at 6 pm, we’ll hold our annual Agile Alliance Member meeting.

If you are a member, please join us, listen to the information from the board and vote. There will also be lots of drinking and eating. The meeting will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, 151 E. Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois USA.

Meeting Agenda:

• Introductions
• Acknowledgement of outgoing board members
• Financial and program reports
• Introduction of the Agile Alliance Roadmap
• Introduction of the new Agile Alliance website
• Introduction of Candidates for the new board
• Vote for the new board (results of the election combine e-votes and in-person votes.  The new board will be announced to the membership on Wednesday, August 26.)

We would like to introduce you to the candidates who are standing for election. The candidates standing for election are well qualified to serve on the board and represent the agile community as it moves into 2010.

The candidates are:

• Laurent Bossavit
• César Idrovo
• Ken Collier
• Esther Derby
• Ola Ellnestam
• Cory Foy
• Israel Gat
• Lasse Koskela
• Henrik Kniberg
• Alexey Krivitsky
• Diana Larsen
• J.B. Rainsberger

You can read statements by all of the candidates here.

As a member of the alliance, you have the option to vote for six candidates. You may vote at the annual members meeting on Tuesday August 25th or online.

While you’re at the conference, visit the Agile Alliance booth in the Exhibit Hall and meet board members and Managing Director, Phil Brock. Last year, Phil brought great swag, and he has something special for this year too.

Several conference attendees this year will be members of the Project Management Institute, who are interested in learning how to make the agile transition. Not only will Project Managers will have access many quality sessions related to their conference persona, but there is a $100 registration discount still available to PMI members. Furthermore, attendees will have a chance to network with other members of the recently launched PMI Agile Community.

A PMI Agile community? What is that, and why are they coming to Agile 2009?

As reported last month by InfoQ, PMI has authorized the formation of a formal community dedicated to agile project management.

“We’re here to solicit advice and recruit volunteers”, says Jesse Fewell, the community’s Chief Product Owner. “The mission of the PMI Agile community is to ‘equip PMI members with Agile skills and knowledge’. Our aim is that in so doing, we have a unique opportunity to influence the right kind of culture change among 600,000 project managers across the world. However, that won’t happen unless agile’s best and brightest join the cause.”

People involved in this new community include: Jesse Fewell, Sanjiv Augustine, Mike Griffiths, Dan Mezick, Mike Cottmeyer, Michele Sliger, Ainsley Nies, Brian Bozzuto, Dave Prior, Jean Laporte, and many others.

The community will celebrate its launch at a reception hosted by Thoughtworks, Inc on Tuesday Aug 25th at 7:30pm in their Chicago offices.

To learn more about the community, check out their self-organizing wiki.

For further reading, check out Mike Griffiths’ article about the importance of the launch of this community and Jesse Jewel’s post about why the PMI is at the conference.

Details on the program can be found not just on the conference web site. Here are contributions from the rest of the web.

The pair at pairwith.us have loaded and sorted the program for us. This is the only place where all the sessions are viewable on a single page. It is also possible to browse day by day.

Eric Lefevre-Ardant has listed sessions that are particularly interesting to some people, particularly fans of the Pomodoro technique,  users of Continuous Integration systems, members of the CITCON community (CITCON is a series of conferences on Continuous Integration & Testing), and Java developers.

Personas are another neat way to browse the program.

Also, re-read our post 5 ways to browse the program.

Finally, last but not least, the iPhone App is the hippest way to read the program and connect with other participants!

See you all soon in Chicago!

In the past few weeks, we have described the various personas used for the conference. Personas are a concept from communication techniques. Instead of abstractly referring to participants (“Most participants are 30-40 years old, have been working most of their lifes as developers. Some will become project managers soon, while some other might be consultants.”), we have tried to refer to types of participants by giving them personality.

Check out our past posts, with suggestions of sessions that might be interesting:

• Brooke, Business Executive
• Rubin, Reluctant Agilist
• Padma, Struggling Product Owner
• Chandra, Consultant
• Tara, Tester
• Alex, Architect
• Rose, Researcher
• Ellie, Agile Explorer
• Billy, Business Analyst
• Carlos, Internal Coach
• Marcus, Program Manager
• Deanna, User Interface Designer
• Patricia, Project Manager
• Peter, Programmer
• Garrett, Guru
• Parker, Product Manager

This post is by Diana Larsen, chair of the Agile Alliance board of directors.

Here is my take on the Top 10 Reasons you want to attend Agile 2009 next week.

• 10. The Keynotes: Alistair Cockburn and Jared Spool promise to provocative, humorous and thoughtful keynote addresses. (See the blog entry and the program as a whole.)
• 9. The Online Program: Whatever you’re looking for at Agile 2009, you can find it in the phenomenal sessions described in the online program:
  • By Time: Go to the program page, and click on any time you want to look at.
  • By Stage: Go to the stages page and click on any stage you’d like to see the program for.
  • By Persona: Go to the list of personas and find the persona that best fits you. (Or, if you’re like me, there are several personas that fit, so look at each of them!) Click on the persona name above the picture and see the sessions for that persona.
• 8. The iPhone app: ThoughtWorks, an Agile 2009 sponsor, has provided a free iPhone/iPod Touch app for making the conference program easily accessible, portable, and customizable. Look in the iTunes App Store for “Agile 2009 conference connection”. More details on the Agile 2009 blog.
• 7. Program Guide: We will still have a printed conference program guide, so non-iPhone users will be able to see the phenomenal sessions on paper, too.
• 6. The 5-Pack: Though Early Bird and Super Early Bird registrations are sold out, you can still save on your registration. Find four other people (from your company or just off the street) who are willing to register together with you. The 5-pack is still the cheapest registration option. See the registration page.
• 5. Take a S.E.A.T.: Taking place during exhibit hours in Riverside Center Exhibition Hall, we invite you to Take a S.E.A.T [Services, Education, Agile, Tools]. It’s the place to see thirty Agile2009 exhibitors present products, services, tools and other information that doesn’t exist elsewhere. See how real-world solutions can help solve your problems while you gain access to some of the most innovative people in the industry. Check out the timetable on the program page.
• 4. Interactive, On-site Contributions: Open Jam offers a place to share questions and quandaries, talk to the experts, demonstrate software and techniques, and experiment with emerging Agile practices and ideas. The LiveAid Lab allows attendees to participate in a real agile project for a Not for Profit-creating a unique lab experience that uses real projects with real deliverables.
• 3. Music Masti: A number of musical instruments will be made available for the conference participants (but you can bring your own). Take part in the biggest jam session of the programming world! There will be activities for non-musicians as well.
• 2. Evening Networking and Reconnecting:  Interact with familiar friends and colleagues and meet new people at the Icebreaker, the Member Meeting, sponsored events, and the Banquet. Learn what other folks have tried, what’s worked for them, what to avoid, and what else they’ve been up to since the last conference.
• 1. Investing in Yourself and Your Craft: Use the conference to soak up all you can about your area of greatest skill and interest in Agile software development. We have over 300 sessions—among them you find just the right ones for you. Invest in your future by finding ways of optimizing your contributions to high value products and services. Become an Agile artisan.

Agile2009: Making Agile Real. See the web site for registration.

Agile 2009 is not the only thing happening in Chicago at the end of August / early September.

You might want to check out these conferences as well:

• Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools (AAFTT) Workshop, hosted by Agile 2009, on August 23rd — over-registered in 2008
• Software Craftsmanship North America (SCNA), on August 26th: come hear, learn from, talk to and meet fellow craftsmen on your quest for a more professional development community
• Pattern Languages of Programs (PLoP), right on the heels of Agile 2009, August 28th-20th: Alistair Cockburn, Dave West, Brian Foote, and Joseph Yoder will be amongst the presenters at the conference for pattern enthusiasts
• JBoss World & Red Hat Summit, September 1st-4th

This handy Google Calendar contains dates of all these conferences; you should be able to link to it from most iCal-compatible clients.

ThoughtWorks, one of our sponsors, has just released an iPhone App to help manage your program. It’s fantastic! It can be found easily on the App Store. Do a search on “Agile 2009 Conference Connection”.

With it, you’ll be able to

• browse the conference program
• check the room map for each session (works offline too)
• build your own program by a simple click on the items of pre-loaded conference program
• read the conference Twitter feed (based on the #agile2009 hashtag) & post your own tweets
• check out the most popular sessions each day (“What’s hot”), determined by total number of people who have the app and have added that session to their schedule
• re-read the always usefull Agile Manifesto

It works well over a wifi connection, hence saving you the 3G fees (especially if you are coming from abroad!). Also, it works fine on an iPod Touch alike, though OS 3.0 is required.

Click here to open the application page directly on iTunes.

“I’m excited to start seeing product more frequently. Incremental development sure beats writing a PRD, throwing it over a wall, and hoping.”

Parker is an experienced product manager for one of the products in his company’s portfolio of commercially successful products. He’s deeply engaged in determining value and setting priorities for each iteration. Parker would like to understand how agile thinking moves into marketing, sales and product support.

Parker might not have time to attend the entire conference. However, he does not want to miss Panel: product owner or product manager or both?, a session introduced by Steve Johnson and Laureen Knudsen. And he will certainly listen to Jeff Sutherland and Igor Altman’s session Take No Prisoners: How a Venture Capital Group Does Scrum.

Does this story sound familiar to you? Parker is a persona, a fictional character used to focus parts of the conference. Come and meet like-minded participants at Agile 2009 Conference. And check out the top sessions at the conference for Parker.

August 14th is the last day for the conference rate at the hotel. To make your reservation, contact the Hyatt Regency hotel in Chicago.

The conference rate is $199/night. Check out the details at the top of this page.