Australian Scrum Community

In March 2006 I attended Certified ScrumMaster training in Sydney. At that course the group shared email addresses and decided to keep in touch. Silence reigned for five months. Everyone was obviously busy.

Meanwhile, I continued to read with envy about the many Scrum, agile and other interesting technical events occuring in the USA and Europe on a regular basis. It is difficult for most Australians to attend such events due to the time and cost involved. Even attending events in another state or territory of this country can be a challenge.

This got me wondering whether a local Scrum website would help connect Scrum practitioners in Australia. So, I bought the scrum.com.au domain and…did nothing. It was always on the to-do list, but other things took priority.

Fast forward to August 2006. Lachlan sent an email to the CSMs who attended training in March with an update on his progress with Scrum. That included details of his team’s unanticipated attempt at the world’s shortest sprint (terminated after less than two days, I believe). Several of the other CSMs responded with their progress. I thought “should build that website”, then…did nothing.

A month later I received an email from Rowan, who had tracked me down as the owner of scrum.com.au. He wanted to know if I was actually going to use the domain name that I was sitting on. I outlined what I had planned, said I was looking for contributors, then…did nothing.

Finally, one Saturday afternoon I sat down and built the website. It took about four hours to create the core site, followed by a few days of fiddling with the templates, CSS and mailing lists to bash it into the shape it is in now.

Without the mental nudges from Lachlan and Rowan this website would probably still exist only in my head. They also deserve a lot of credit for taking the time to post articles here, which has really helped get the site off to a great start. So, thanks guys! Keep up the good work. ;-)