Barcelona Open Space event

On February 28th our team in Barcelona celebrated the first Open Space of the new decade. Open Space is a day where the entire team gathers together in the office to spend time together and share what we’ve learned.

Have you ever been in an Open Space? It’s an inspiring and fulfilling event, with a set of basic principles:

1. Whoever comes are the right people
2. Whatever happens, is the only thing that could have
3. Whenever it starts is the right time
4. When it’s over, it’s over

If during the course of the gathering, any person finds themselves in a situation where they are neither learning nor contributing, they can go to some more productive place.

The most challenging part of the day is when we collectively introduce our topics and book time slots for our meetings. We individually stand up in front of everyone and introduce the topic we would like to host a meeting on. There is a wall with a grid that has all the meeting rooms as columns and the time slots as rows. Everyone who is interested in giving a talk introduces their topic and then books a time slot. Collaboration emerges immediately when there is not enough space for all the talks, or when topics spontaneously emerge to cover free slots.

The event wouldn’t be complete without breaks. During these breaks, we gather together to share some food and drinks while discussing the sessions, projects we are involved in, meetups, or even something we are reading that we found captivating. It’s a great time to catch up with colleagues to talk about families, hobbies, and other things we enjoy in our spare time.

During this Open Space in Barcelona, we discussed a variety of topics such as:

• Intuitive physics
• Celebration and the role of emotion in making change happen
• Neuro rights
• Emergent design with CRC cards
• Multitasking and portfolio management
• A story about remote pairing
• The future of FinTech in Spain
• Anatomy of a monster: a distorted organisational setup
• The leadership wheel and the 6 leadership styles
• The easiest monolith extraction in the world
• Serverless Q&A
• Reviewing the architecture while drinking mate

The topic with the most attendees, tracing some parallelism with what happened in the last London Open Space in January, was the talk about Serverless. This seems to be a trending topic lately around the industry and of course in Codurance. At the moment we are preparing several training sessions for our clients on serverless. Luckily the experts on the topic could share their insights and experiences so far.

On the other hand, the other talk that received the most recognition was on remote pairing in a Codurance project. Both of the talks were widely accepted by the attendees and resulted in a very engaged and fluid debate about the topics reviewed.

Each Open Space concludes with a final closing session, in which, as you can imagine, all the participants gather in the room and review all the talks. One of the attendees of each session gives a brief highlight of the content.

For us, this Open Space was very special. It was the first of the year and the first of the decade. We commemorated the success with a cava toast and raised our glasses hoping the best is yet to come.