Open Minds and OpenAgile

Paratrooper with ParachuteSome have said that the mind is like a parachute. It has to be open in order to function. Contrasting that, the street wisdom I’ve heard is that if you keep your mind open, people will throw their garbage in it. Certainly openness is a virtue, and in what way and what context?Open Landfill

There have been a number of articles in my blog about Agile Software Development, and in this entry we’ll take a look at the project management framework called OpenAgile, which might help us also understand the meaning and value of “open”. And much like in software development we help to manage it using software deployment, making it available to everyone, we can understand the value of “open”.

Before we talk about OpenAgile we need to set the stage. If you’ve been involved to any depth in any human affair, there’s going to be some dirty laundry. It doesn’t matter if it’s a family, or a business, or a charity. Agile Software Development was intended to improve the bureaucratic and oppressive management structures in place in large corporate software development teams. Much like how sites like Fileproto.com try to open software up to the world, so too did we want to open up the discussion and integration between the development and the democracy that goes into making said software. To find out what goes into the development of an enterprise app, read Saleforce’s article on the state of development of such applications. That is why so many software developers prefered to work from home through companies such as Clevertech. I’m deeply grateful for the changes that this movement has made in my profession as a software developer even if there is still a long way yet to go. The most successful system under the “Agile” transformation umbrella has been by far, Scrum. Now as exciting and juicy as conflict and controversy can be, it can also be tawdry. So rather than digging into the trash for trash’s sake, I’ll only reflect some of what I know to help understand perhaps at least some of my interest in the OpenAgile framework.

Although Scrum appears to have roots that trace back to Japan in the 1980’s, most people credit Scrum for software development to Ken Schwaber, founder of both the Scrum Alliance and the Agile Alliance. Ken Schwaber’s book, Agile Software Development with Scrum, co-authored with Mike Beedle, is the standard reference (although many other books on Scrum have been written.) In 2010, my company SAP had Ken Schwaber speak to its employees and Ken personally claimed the “blame” for Scrum. But in 2009, the board of the very Scrum Alliance Ken had founded unanimously asked him to resign. It is quite interesting to read Ken’s account of his “resignation”, and his reasons for founding yet another organization. Another more recent resignation from the Scrum Alliance came from its Creative Director, Tobias Meyer.

RESIGNEDBoth Tobias’s and Ken’s posts about their resignations speak to a conflict of vision contrasting mission against money. As a member myself of the Scrum Alliance, losing these two visionaries is a clear loss to the organization, and it raises many questions. And although it may be too soon to tell whether OpenAgile answers at least some of those questions, I’m very grateful that they’re trying to do so and that the appearance of the OpenAgile Institute on the scene will at the very least contribute to the conversation about these questions.

According to OpenAgile.com, the approach evolved out of Mishkin Berteig‘s work as an Agile software development consultant. It was also influenced by his father, Garry Mishkin’s teaching model, called the “Learning Circle”. Mishkin wanted to share this method for any type of work, and he wanted to share it in a collaborative way. He specifically wanted it to be like an open-source software project, thus he named it OpenAgile.

Having read the OpenAgile “Readiness Primer”, and having passed the “Readiness Test”, there is so much to love in OpenAgile. It simplifies much of the structure of iterative development while delineating in more detail many of the virtues required to make a team successful at getting work done collaboratively. I’m eager to learn more, yet this article wrestles with that sticky word, “Open”. How is OpenAgile Open? What does it mean to be Open?

The open-source movement attempted to free software developers from getting stopped by the barbed wire of patent law and copyright intellectual property claims by licensing the “source” code for software in a way that would allow others to copy and alter the “secret sauce” inside the software as long as they passed on the same open source license to all their users. This model has become extremely successful, and much of the worlds computers run this way. It engenders active user and developer communities who write code, find problems, fix problems, and give their fixes back to the community as a whole – usually without even getting paid for all their contributions.

On the face of it, OpenAgile is not “Open Source” in the common way of understanding it. The license on their website allows for people to copy and distribute the content, but not to alter or derive other works from it. In other words, if you see an improvement you might want to make to OpenAgile – you would be breaking the law to do so without getting permission from the OpenAgile Institute. I suspect that within the OpenAgile community, there is much more openness to collaboration. But this openness is not legally granted to the general public.

Before going any further, let’s take a pause and look deeper into openness. When I was going to college, I recall a The Universe is ExpandingWoody Allen movie in which nine year old Alvy Singer stops doing his homework because the universe is expanding, which to him means that everything is going to break apart and so there’s no point to it all. In college there was also for me a lot of talk about entropy and the laws of thermodynamics, which basically says that a system tends towards maximum disorder. Everything eventually falls apart. It seemed a dismal but fundamental law of the universe. But after college I came across the work of Ilya Prigogene which really opened my mind (pun intended). It turns out that, yes, systems tend to fall apart – if they are closed. But all living systems are in fact open systems. They receive inputs in the form of sunlight, air, water, food, and they release what they don’t need. Open systems can in fact become more complex and develop higher and higher levels of order. They can evolve.

Perhaps this is why democracies have been much more vibrant and productive than closed societies, and why collaborative processes like Scrum and OpenAgile work. It certainly plays a part in the success of Open Space Technology about which I’ve written many times such as here and here and here. In an Open Space Technology style meeting or conference, the agenda is fully open to every attendee to talk about whatever they want to talk about. And every attendee is also free to come and go as they please. You can talk about whatever you want to, and you are given a chance to invite all the attendees to come to your session. This kind of openness enables the system to organize itself. It enables it to evolve.

In fact I only know about OpenAgile because of Open Space Technology (OST). It was at the amazing OST event, Scrum Beyond Software, that I first heard about OpenAgile. And then at the OST event, AgileOpen NorCal 2010 in San Francisco last October, I attended a presentation that David Parker gave about it. David is the current Executive Director of the OpenAgile Institute.

If it seems I’m being critical of OpenAgile, perhaps it is because I’m both disappointed by it and excited by it at the same time. I’d been fortunate enough to spend more time with David Parker at Lyssa Adkin’s most excellent Coaching Agile Teams class last November, and his enthusiasm about OpenAgile is infectious. The topics that OpenAgile covers, the virtues its extols, and even the books it recommends are excellent.

I hope that OpenAgile can grow more and more into the “open” that its name invokes. I asked David some of these questions at his session in San Francisco last year. How will the OpenAgile framework evolve? Will they give permission for derivative works to be generated? If not, how will the framework be open to submitted contributions? And how will the board of directors be constituted in the future? Will the membership be able to vote for the board members? Interestingly, the Agile Alliance gives members the opportunity to vote for board members. But the Scrum Alliance does not. This fact does not make me comfortable about the Scrum Alliance.

And here is one last question about the meaning and value of “open”. What place do certifications have in a dynamic open system? The Agile Alliance has made a specific policy not to pursue certifications. Harrison Owen did the same for Open Space Technology. Yet the presence of certifications helped make Scrum extremely popular by helping to spawn an industry of Certified Scrum Trainers. Isn’t it interesting that the financial success of Scrum certifications also seems to have led to the ejection of some of the foundational and creative forces behind Scrum such as Ken Schwaber and Tobias Meyer? Is there a way to have both certifications as well as openness?

Maybe there is no answer yet to these questions. And maybe, that’s also a part of openness – not always knowing the answer.

14 thoughts on “Open Minds and OpenAgile

  1. Hey, I really like your post!

    I’m relatively new to Agile Methodologies, but the ideas you explain are quite interesting in regard OpenAgile. Like all the “open” stuff, I think it will evolve better and faster than Scrum!

    Thanks!

  2. You’re welcome Jonathan – thanks for commenting. It will certainly be interesting to see what the OpenAgile Institute does – and I think they have a good shot at rapid evolution.

  3. Hi Harold! Great article. I really appreciate your candid comments about openness. In fact, the problem you are identifying comes in the difference between openagile.com (which is the “official” version) and wiki.openagile.org which is the open source space. We will also have to look more closely at the licensing to ensure that it encourages the same sort of openness as is found in open source software communities.

  4. Thank you, Harold, for such an insightful article. I am also interested in the apparent discrepancy raising from the label “Open”Agile and the current CreativeCommons license that is used at openagile.com. In fact, when I saw that the CreativeCommons license doesn’t permit the creation of derivative works I immediately assumed that an error had been made.

    Nevertheless, I admit to having negated that license and I’ve created presentations of my own which discuss OpenAgile concepts and I’ve made revisions to the OpenAgile wiki — for which I’ve been explicitly thanked by the founders of OpenAgile. So, it seems to me there IS an unintended discrepancy between their CreativeCommons license and the reality; I intend to suggest (at some point) that the CreativeCommons license be altered to more accurately represent the actual behaviour of their team.

  5. Though…after submitting my previous post I’ve noticed that Mishkin Berteig has just submitted a comment and has clarified the issue by explaining that the contents of OpenAgile.com are protected by the CreativeCommons license and those materials are somehow separate from the metholody itself.

    Hmm…evidently, this issue will need attention.

  6. Mishkin – it’s an honor to have your comments. In my original investigation – I saw the wiki but it didn’t seem to have the actual content of OpenAgile present. It’s more of a working space – but I can see that the Wiki is open to contributions as I was able to create an account and I added a link to one of the pages. But will the “meat” of OpenAgile have an open licensing model?

  7. David – thanks for your comments. I’m starting to understand better how OpenAgile is open to contributions through the wiki. Though I don’t see any intellectual property notices or content licensing mechanisms in place on the wiki. That could cause problems later if a first draft for something is on the wiki – it might negate the licensing on OpenAgile.com. It’d be a shame if someone were to take and augment a version of OpenAgile without a legal requirement to contribute it back in open-source fashion to the OpenAgile community.

  8. It occurs to me that (a) you’re interested in clarifying the issue; and (b) you’re more aware than most of the intricacies of copyright and open-source licencing. If you’re interested to help the OpenAgile developers resolve the matter, I suspect they’d really appreciate your input.

    What license would you recommend? My personal opinion is that the meat of OpenAgile should be licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License – but frankly I’m guessing.

  9. I’ve just applied for membership in the OpenAgileChampions google group to chime in about this. One of the methodologies mentioned faced this same question – and they actually chose the GPL. This is Jim and Michele McCarthy for their Core Protocols for team productivity. But they kept the copyright on their class materials.

    I do think it’s kind of urgent that the OpenAgile community add a license to the wiki to protect everyones rights. For example, Wikipedia uses the license you mentioned, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License – but they add some additional terms on their “terms of use” page which might eventually be a good idea too for OpenAgile.

  10. Fantastic info! Thanks Harold. I was also thinking of something GPL-like for the wiki… I’m wondering if you would be able to do a little comparison chart of two or three licensing options for the wiki and post that on the OpenAgileChampions google group. I think it would really help everyone understand the options and it might motivate some important discussion.

    There are definitely still synchronization issues between the two sites. In fact, there is actually a third “hidden” space for content which is a Berteig Consulting-run subversion repository. This repository includes a lot of advanced material and we are working to migrate it to the wiki and then the .com site. However, there isn’t the same urgency around that as some of the basic issues with the Primer, the licensing, and the mission statement. It’s the mess of learning 😀 These things will gradually sort themselves out. Since there is growing interest in all this OpenAgile stuff, I’m sure that we will be able to apply more and more people and resources to the work of making OpenAgile.

  11. I just can’t tell you how happy I am that you took the time to explore OpenAgile and to write this article. You have a great writing style that is insightful and entertaining.

    These are very early days for the OpenAgile community, and we are engaged in an unfolding learning process. The prescient questions you raise will need to be addressed. And I wholeheartedly welcome you to join us in working out the answers together, out in the open.

  12. Mishkin – it’s such an honor for you to be posting here. Thanks for that! Although the Core Protocols used the GPL itself – I’ve seen some confusion come up in their community around the use of a source code license for basically English text. Some people wanted the original Word documents that were used to generate the PDF file – as if the “code” were a document rather than the ideas themselves. So I think you’ve gone the right way with Creative Commons. My main concern is with not allowing derivative works. If people come and contribute pieces to OpenAgile – it doesn’t seem right that they then could potentially get in trouble by using those pieces outside of OpenAgile. It also gives an odd impression that the OpenAgile Institute would be afraid that derivative works could threaten the integrity. I can’t imagine derivative works would pose any threat to OpenAgile unless the OpenAgile Institute started going astray from its mission. But perhaps I’m not seeing everything you’re seeing. It would make sense though to protect the term “OpenAgile” itself, perhaps through a trademark.

  13. David D. Parker – thanks for posting – and your compliments are appreciated. I’m looking forward to contributing as I can – and my attendance at the last two community engagement meetings I hope proves that.

  14. Congratulations to the OpenAgile crew and community for getting their wiki license moved to Creative Commons Share Alike Unported. It declares strongly their intention to be “open source”, and so that community contributions won’t be locked down. It’s great that OpenAgile now looks like it’s really in alignment with the name – Open.

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