On Tuesday June 27 we had our yearly RUGS&DUGS. That is the Doors and Rhapsody User Group Summit. Actually the correct abbreviation would be DRUGS. Is fine with me (i’m Dutch) but my German colleagues were against that name. Well OK… but acronyms ending in UGS are all problematic… well except Hugs I guess 😉 Check out RUGS/DUGS in google…
But the conference was successful despite the name, a lot of users were there. This year we were in München, not exactly my favourite city. Or to be precise: i hate Munich. Traffic is hell, public transportation sucks, hotel cost a fortune unless there is a fair then hotels cost more than a house in north Germany, the local soccer team are a bunch of tax criminals.
Enough about bad stuff, onto the good stuff. On our User Group Meetings (and also the MESConf we held the day before) we use something called “Open Space”. This is something that was invented by Harrison Owen and David Belisle. These guys organised conferences and in their evaluations they found out that most people liked the conversations they had during the breaks best. So they figured out a way to extend the conversations during breaks: cut the presentations and formalize the breaks.
There is a time/place plan that allows for multiple conversations to take place, participants determine the topics themselves, put them on a board on a specific time and place and others can, with a look on the board, determine what is interesting to go to.
Works like a charm, i’ve witnessed an Open Space conference a dozen times now and all were great. You can learn a lot in a short time.
More Info
This is one of the methods we use to spread our knowledge about MDSE/Rhapsody/Doors/etc. Other methods are:
IBM DeveloperWorks (Recommended!!!)
Rhapsody4You (please use Developerworks from now on!)
UMLforum (use Developerworks please!)
You see, enough possibilities to extend your knowledge and become an MDSE Pro real fast! About the forums: In close cooperation with IBM (Thanks Johan Adelgaard!!) we decided to concentrate all Rhapsody knowledge on the IBM site. You will need an IBM ID to login but that is totally free and takes 1 minute to set up.
The next UML Trainings are:
- 19. – 21.09.2017 in Stuttgart
- 14. – 16.11.2017 in Bückeburg
Happy Modeling with Rhapsody!
Walter van der Heiden, wvdheiden@willert.de
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