Picture courtesy of wili_hybrid@flickr

Today Scan-Agile, the first large North European conference opened its registration page. It is going to take place in Helsinki on October 29. It has an excellent set of speakers, that include Gabrielle Benefield - a former director of Agile development in Yahoo! and Bas Vodde - an expert on all things large scale. It has an open space, practitioner and awareness tracks and because of being run by a non-profit organization, it is cheap (just 200 euros). If you happen to be around Finland in the end of October, consider spending a day on the conference.

I was going to add some motivational story with a moral that would make you think about visiting a conference, but Vasco Duarte, one of the conference organizers and Agile expert with many years under the belt did it already. Go read his story about why his grandpas would love the conference and consider registering while there are still seats left.

I am leaving in Finland and I am trying to follow the local agile community news. There is a local Agile Finland website, some free seminars with the world-class speakers and quite active discussion group. This week something significant happened there

The 7th International conference on eXtreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering is going to take place on June 17-22, 2006, Oulu, Finland. According to the program, despite its name the conference is going to be focused more on the Agile Processes, than exactly on XP.

Among the speakers there are Kent Beck, the father of eXtreme Programming; Mike Cohn, the founder of Mountain Goat Software - strong Scrum supporter; Michael Feathers, author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code and a lot of other Agile Alliance founding members and board members.