I’m Still Here

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I’m still here!

Since my last post a long, long time ago

Your Bayit

  • I engaged on a yearlong journey with the rabbis of YourBayit.org to create sketchnotes for a full cycle of Torah in preparation for editing and publishing the posts for each portion (each one is called a dvar Torah, together they are called divrei Torah). You can see all of the posts at https://yourbayit.org/blog/. Or you can wait for the book – may take a while – which we’re calling by the working title of “A Year of Building Torah”
  • Also with Bayit, we have teed up a second book geared to help Jewish educators, clergy, and seekers learn to sketchnote in ways that help them teach or find deeper meaning. The working title for this project is called “Sketchnoting Jewishly”.
  • Lastly on the Bayit front, I taught basic Business Agility and flow concepts to a bunch of really openminded rabbis! We set up a set of Trello board to make work visible and then everybody went into High Holiday mode – basically went dark until the holidays were done. Looking forward to getting traction in this area. I suspect there’s a case study and conference presentation in there somewhere.

Agile Community Building

I’ve been working to find, meet and connect Agile people in Northeast Florida.

  • I created a Slack channel called agileJax.Slack.com to connect people by online conversations in a safe space.
  • I’ve also presented at the North Florida Agile Meetup thrice in the past several months. Once was to teach out and facilitate Lean Coffee as a meeting hack, the second time was to teach out the use of games as powerful workplace learning tools (and playing too!), and the last time was to teach out basic Visual Facilitation techniques.
  • I’ve been expanding my reach to find new Agile friends across Florida in Tampa, Miami, Palm Beach, and Orlando through social media, Slack, and by phone/video. I love meeting people!
  • As a result of putting myself out there, I’ll be presenting on sketchnoting basics at the November Agile Orlando meetup. On my backlog is to present on something at Agile Gainesville, Agile Tampa, the Tampa Product meetup, and maybe even at a few events in Palm Beach and Miami.
  • I just this morning returned from the AgileOpenFlorida in Lakeland, FL. This was a daylong Open Space unconference where an entire agenda is built by the participants in 30 minutes. Love this conference hack! This event was the first time I’ve been with my Agile tribe since leaving Virginia to  work on building an Agile community in Jacksonville. I did a lite workshop on visual vocabulary and sketching basics and walked around with Happy Salmon instigating pop-up games to energize folks and teach out engaging and fun ways to learn about team dynamics.

Lot done, lots more to do!