Following last years’ IRL get together, members of the Agile in the Ether Community spent another sunny Friday in Liverpool connecting and sharing ideas. Such a brilliant way to brighten up February.
As with last year, this year’s theme was strengthening connections across the community, with a hefty serving of learning together.
It comes at the perfect time of year. With hybrid working, people are really craving time together, especially after the long January.
Not much changed with the successful format from last year: dinner (tea in the north) on Thursday night to give people a chance to chat with friends, meet people they didn’t know, and get everyone settled in and ready for Friday.
On Friday, we had a mix of 45min interaction sessions from Sophie Weston, Neil Vass, Simon Manby, and me, a lean coffee, and a leisurely 90 minutes for lunch (dinner in the north) for people to chat, get some air, and sample some more of Liverpool’s fine dining establishments.
We kept costs low: just £25 to secure a spot. Most of the people’s contributions for attending went to Thursday night’s dinner, with the rest going to a local charity, which we explicitly stated upfront. The organisers covered any other costs like room hire and post-it notes.
Some things that worked really well:
The social evening the night before really did give everyone a chance to meet, chat, feel ready for Friday, and, for some, sample late-night cocktails. The Thursday night social is essential.
The community contribution. Everyone chipped in efforts to help with the day. I used a big timer so we could all keep things on track, shared copies of the agenda, and asked people to contribute to moving chairs and a shared snack table.
Brilliant interactive sessions. We had attendees submit sessions and vote to decide what sessions we’d run up front. They were a good spread of topics from how to learn and team building to causal loops. I won’t share the write-up in this post, but I will share links it when others do.
Great venue. We use DoES, a maker space in Liverpool. It’s very chilled, friendly, and full of gadgets. Perfect for us.
A long lunch Someone said to me “90mins really! I’ve never had so long for lunch”. It gave people time to get outside and space between sessions.
Some things to consider next time
The way we released spaces needs to be updated for next year. Last year, we didn’t quite fill all the spots; this year, they went in 10 minutes.
This meant that people missed out. And the people who missed out the most were the ones who couldn’t make the decision to come within those 10 minutes. My hunch is that it affected those with caring responsibilities the most, which was more likely to be women; this was reflected in the gender balance of attendees and confirmed by a couple of people who didn’t get spaces. We’ll do it differently next year.
We have a few other tweaks to make, but we’ll mostly keep things the same next year.
Here’s what people said
“thank you everyone else for generally being a lovely bunch. Was a great experience all round and I’m very grateful.“
“One of my favourite things about both these IRL events is when I get chatting to someone, then try to work out if we’ve ever met in person before — often neither of us are sure! After years of conversation in Slack channels and video meetups, it feels like we know each other really well.“
“thanks everyone for such a wonderful time. I’d been excited for the second one the moment the last one finished“
“Thank you all for fostering such a warm and welcoming environment, I have come away with lots of thoughts and ideas that I am going to explore further.“
“My first event since Covid hit – and well worth it” 🙂“
“Eating my lunch, thinking back to IRL last Friday, and remembering when going to work used to have a bit of that IRL vibe about it. Ah. The good times, eh.”
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It was a brilliant event, thanks to everyone who came and my co-organisers (Caroline Hatwell, Sophie Weston, Andrew Wilding-Smith, Neil Vass, Simon Manby, Andy Norton and Ian Ames).
If you want to join this lovely community, the first step is to attend a meetup. Join the mailing list to find out when the next one is.
Also see Neil Vass’ write up of the sessions over here neil-vass.com/agile-in-the-ether-irl-2025-edition
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