First day of the unconference ALE2013

The first magic day started with the open intro made by the organizers. Jurgen Appelo had the opening keynote about the new organizational structure of the 21^st century: the network, not the hierarchy. I realized from his talk that learning through experiments and remembered is the way to improve.

After the speakers introduced their talk, it was challenging for us to pick one talk out of three held in parallel. We managed to make these tough choices and came back for lunch.

After a a delicious lunch we were ready for the Open Space. An even bigger challenge presented to us after the Market Place filled with very interesting subjects for discussions. We had to choose one out of 6-7 sessions. Fortunately, the locations were close and we could walk from one to another, in the spirit of “The Law of Two Feet”.

Today, I heard people talking about respect, trust, learning, experiment and creativity. Those things were not be heard but applied during the day. The program was respected (except some unexpected technical issues – one Windows computer rebooted for updates during the talk), the people’s opinion was respected, mobile phones were silent during sessions. Feedback was easy to provide and this helped the organisers to improve for tomorrow.

The conference day didn’t end with the “End of conference sessions”; instead it continued with “Dinner with a stranger”.

Are you prepared for the ALE13 second day? I will tell you tomorrow about it. Until then, make sure you follow the #ALE13 twitter hashtag.