How I started to build an Agile Community

Why build a community?

I'm passionate about finding ways to simplify the course of work, focus on increasing productivity and thrilled with frameworks, techniques and methodologies. While navigating various resources, I observed many people talking about scrum framework as a synonym of agile methods, Kanban method as their primary technique for agile, and stick notes as the fancy tool to bring someone to the agile world. Most of the time, people forget that Agile is more than those things. It creates value, focusing on adaptability, transparency, reduction of waste, and bringing natural productivity through cadence.

Based on my experience, agile is not scrum, and it's beyond software development. However, It was empirical, and I faced a challenge to find reliable resources on this topic or people with different backgrounds to share experiences and thoughts. I was looking for diversity, inclusion and equity to promote a safe and supportive environment for all members to discuss, learn, and thrive.

In search of a heterogeneous group, I found all those different groups with members in their comfort zone talking about everyday topics around the same idea. So I kept looking for a group that would bring that together when I found Women in Agile (WIA); WIA is a non-profit organization from the USA with more than 60 local groups worldwide. But, unfortunately, they didn't have a local group in Toronto, one of the 10 largest cities in North America, and I started to ask myself: How is that possible?

After a couple of e-mail exchanges, the Women In Agile Toronto kick-off was ready.

With the encouragement of Women in Agile, I began:

1. Calling out for help, two amazing women joined me in this journey within a couple of weeks.
2. Identifying our purpose as a community
3. Mapping our audience
4. Defining the value that we'll deliver to our community

And then:

1. Everyone brought ideas to our dream list that we prioritized
2. Each had an opportunity to choose what they wanted to do.

Together, we defined our workstream. We used an iterative model where we planned, executed, asked for feedback, reviewed our actions and self-assessments, and implemented an action plan based on lessons learned for each interaction focused on process improvement. Does that remind you of something?

Fast-forwarding to today, 10 months after the Local group inception, we have a structure totally different and much better than the first one. We have cadence, identified our capacity and know our velocity. We are proud to build a community and create the Webinar Series 2021 with monthly events focusing on various skills and experiences, which resulted until August on:

• Average of 230+ registers in the last 6 events;
• One webinar per month since March 2021;
• Seven different speakers
• 530+ registered attendants since the beginning;
• 450+ Followers in Women in Agile Linkedin Page.
• 250+ members in Women in Agile Toronto Meetup group;
• ?80 followers on the Eventbrite page;
• All with an average of 50+ attendees per session;

As community builders, we come along with the community to grow and make things happen, doesn't matter how.