The Gordon Pask Award for contributions to Agile practice
The award
The Gordon Pask Award recognizes two people whose recent contributions to Agile Practice make them, in the opinion of the Award Committee, people others in the field should emulate. In order that people might emulate them, the Agile Alliance will fund each recipient’s travel to two different suitable conferences on two different continents. In order to grow the next generation of Agile thought leaders, the Award is given to people who aren’t already routinely invited to conferences, presumably because their reputation is not yet widespread.
2009 winners
Joe Rainsberger captured the essence of David Hussman’s work by saying “David is not just someone who builds agile communities, but someone who is building community builders”. David’s coaching is centered on getting to know communities and their members so he can help foster real value using a meaningful collection of agile methods which amplify existing strengths and confront existing challenges.
For each engagement, David works hard to grow internal coaching and coaches. He is genuinely inquisitive and insightful about people. His coaching style is non-dogmatic, well-grounded, challenging and pragmatic. Focusing on getting to know project communities helps David seed self-discovery and avoid falling into the expert trap of telling people what they “should do”.
David’s coaching includes introducing agile methods to large international project communities as well as working side by side with members of small collocated teams, helping them to tune and improve their agility. Along with his coaching, David has helped create or produce a variety of agile gatherings including Agile Egypt, Practical Agility, CodeFreeze and Agile Palooza to name a few. In his home town of Minneapolis / St Paul, David leads several local groups like Practical Agility and the Twin Cities chapter of Agile Philanthropy.
For more information about David, his company, or to view a variety of his presentations and publications, check out his website: www.devjam.com
Simon Baker and Gus Power have had a profound effect on the way the people around them view agile methods in the real world. They’ve repeatedly demonstrated that their No Compromise, No Excuses approach consistently creates and maintains exceptionally high performing teams that deliver high quality software, and within the same kind of dysfunctional organizations that most of us work for.
Through their study and application of lean accounting they have created a financial system to support going from "concept to cash every week". It makes visible the consequences of business decisions and the real cash value of a project as software is released every week. The CFO of a major UK company told them he’d never seen a project before where he could see so clearly what he needed to know.
There are no secrets behind their success – they use the techniques they teach with commitment, applying their values and raw common sense with rigor, and they invest in growing the skills of the people they work with. They attract tremendous loyalty from their teams. Simon and Gus have shown us how much we can expect to achieve by holding to the values of the Agile movement. Follow Gus and Simon’s blog at http://www.agileinaction.com
The Gordon Pask Award committee also wants to highlight Corey Haines pair programming tour – find out more at http://programmingtour.blogspot.com/ The Gordon Pask Award committee encourages Agile Alliance members to support Corey with this.
2008 winners
Kenji Hiranabe is the face of agile in Japan. He has translated several important books to make them available to the Japanese audience. He has also done original work applying mind mapping techniques to various activities we normally perform in agile software development. We chose Kenji to recognize his work as well as to encourage the exchange of ideas with Japan. Kenji imports and exports ideas as well as people: he arranged for a delegation of a dozen people to come to Agile 2008 from Japan.
Arlo Belshee has contributed significant ideas to agile practitioners. His groundbreaking paper “Promiscuous Pairing and Beginner’s Mind: Embrace Inexperience” has on its own influenced the way many individuals and teams work day to day. Arlo exemplifies the leadership the agile community sorely needs: an experimenter at heart, he tries his ideas in real-life situations, then reports his results. He has the courage to run a business that holds many of these ideas at its center. In a field where many theorize, he applies. Arlo gives the agile practitioners more tools for their tool belts and we wanted both to recognize his past work and encourage further work. We need Arlo to advance as a field.
The community also recognized Bob Payne leading a new philanthropy movement within the agile community, as well as his Agile Toolkit Podcast, which brings agile community leaders and practitioners to the MP3 players of the world. The Agile Alliance has agreed to support Bob’s efforts financially and to launch a formal program to help develop a philanthrophic arm of the Agile Alliance and the agile community at large.
2007 winners
Naresh Jain, for his work establishing user groups in India and for the Simple Design and Testing conference; and Jeff Patton, for his work helping establish what User Centered Design means in Agile (including the agile-usability group) and for being an example of the usefulness of being fluent in two fields (programming and UCD).
The committee also broke from its charter to create a new award—the Ward Cunningham Gentle Voice of Reason Award—and awarded it to Dale Emery for what he’s done on the XP and other mailing lists, and in person; and also for his work creating environments where change happens (rather than, as J.B. Rainsberger put it, “inflicting change on people”).
2006 winners
Laurent Bossavit, for translating Extreme Programming Explained into French, for early and helpful activity on the English-language XP mailing list, for organizing a French-language site, mailing list, and wiki, for XP Day France, for the (incipient) thoughts on his blog, and for his championing of code dojos.
The collaborators Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce for helping found XP Day, for their long-time involvement in the Extreme Tuesday Club, for their joint role in the development, evolution, and popularization of the idea of mock objects and its realization in jMock, and for the networks of collaborations they’re involved in (storytelling in Fit and scrapheap programming, for example).
2005 winners
J. B. Rainsberger, for spending a great deal of time helping people on the testdrivendevelopment mailing list, for writing JUnit Recipes, for XP Day Toronto, and for being this year’s Agile2005 tutorial chair.
Jim Shore, for his performance as a paper shepherd; for a fine experience report he gave at ADC2003 that, together with his blog, suggest a cast of thought that deserves cultivation; for his work on the Fit specification and the C# version of Fit; and for being a person who holds the Fit world together by doing the sort of organizational and cleanup tasks that are usually thankless.
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