Secretary in Agile Spain

I’m currently closing my last tasks related to Agile Spain (budgets…). For those who don’t know, I was part of the board of Agile Spain, acting as secretary, for 2 years, until this last September.

And writing my thoughts about the things we accomplished there are 2 things I’m not proud of… the first one is that, although we claimed to be a proactive board in the election, in the end, we acted as a reactive one, just providing infrastructure to the agile spain events, answering emails, and putting out fires.

I have the nagging feeling that Agile Spain is afraid of change and comfortable (in the comfort zone sense) in having 2 events a year with the same formula. We didn’t do anything new in that space (apart from an event for members).

The other thing I could have improved is the transparency, posting the trello, slack, conversations… maybe the next board can take that step.

But there are some things I did and I am proud of:

• We kept an almost constant Inbox 0 in the info account, answering and solving almost immediately all the issues. There are several hundred emails per year and it was something all the boards have trouble with, so I’m quite proud of this one.
• We lend an active hand in all the events, helping with the budget, solving doubts about deadlines, payments, sponsorships and setting up websites. I think we got involved a lot more than previous years and the organizers were more comfortable and happier. I personally helped in all the events and, at least, we didn’t find ugly surprises with the balance of previous events.
• We tried several ways of sharing knowledge between organizers, like an FAQ with common doubts, shared social accounts, shared inventory, budget models, usual deadlines… I am really proud of this one.
• We used Agile Spain as the fiscal umbrella for several events: Software Craftsmanship, SOSz, lechazoconf… I think it worked flawlessly :)
• We did all the fiscal compromises on time (!) and solved several monetary issues that Agile Spain suffered.
• We organized all the hosted sites (that were crashing continuously) to another type of VPS (and paying less!)
• We set up a slack community and moved the board conversations to slack. The slack for the community didn’t work as fine as I thought but it isn’t as dead as the mailing list…
• We set up payments for the members of Agile Spain with Stripe and organized the list of members.

Those are things I championed for or was heavily involved. I’m happy with those achievements but, as always, I wish to have done more things and be more helpful. Maybe another time.

PD: If you want to see the FAQ, budgets or documents, I can share them. Just ask on twitter