Agile2020 and the Emerging Economies Initiative

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At Agile2019, word was just starting to spread that I was going to be the 2020 conference chair and Rafael Prikladnicki shared with me more about the Emerging Economies Initiative that Angie Doyle chairs.


Immediately this resonated with me and his passion for this initiative was inescapable. After that initial conversation, I talked this through with both Angie and Rafael and they helped me appreciate how amazing it would be if we could make a step towards this initiative at Agile2020 itself.

You can read more about the Emerging Economies Initiative chaired by Angie Doyle and supported by Agile Alliance here, but the primary purpose of the initiative is to assist economically emerging economies by providing affordable access to premium Agile events and speakers. While what we are doing for Agile2020 is slightly different, it is with the same heart behind it. We are using the same list of economies identified in the initiative, but we realised that for Agile2020 we had the opportunity to enable speakers from those markets to be part of the conference. They would be exposed to all the knowledge and stories at the conference so they would not only benefit as individuals, but also allow them to return to their communities and share these takeaways to the benefit of even more people. We also hope that by raising awareness of Agile Alliance and the conference, more people from these economies will get involved in the review team in years to come and become a voice to help shape the Agile Community of the future.

After much consideration and deliberation we settled on this aim for 2020: We are having approximately 6 sessions on the program specifically curated based on this initiative. With the help of Evan Leybourn, Christina Hartikainen, Dana Pylayeva, and Shane Hastie, we identified great people from within some of the emerging economies, who will be wonderful mentors to another voice from their respective regions. We are working with these mentors to bring other speakers from their region to Agile2020.

We hope to help bring the learnings from these economies to the larger conference community, and in turn give these new voices access to the teachings and experiences of the fantastic attendees and speakers at Agile2020.

We hope you will join us in helping to socialise great content to all Agilists and support the larger Emerging Economy initiative.

Learn more about Agile2020 and register today!


About the Author


Emma comes with a degree in Computer Science many moons ago and chose to work as a test engineer, starting out as a compiler tester in the semi conductor chip industry. During this time she became familiar with both hardware and software and used many languages to develop and enhance automated testing against a suite of tools and enable developers to be able to initiate their own builds and determine the status of these and allow them to investigate build issues early.
This good grounding in the development lifecycle and the varied development activities form what is now called DevOps, develop build and test through to release was invaluable to the rest of her career.
She has continued this career path under different job titles and in different methodologies and varied languages but always believing that it is important to consider the whole cycle from conception through to value delivery, support and maintenance. This led to a feeling of affinity with agile and she now works as an agile coach. She has been actively involved in training and coaching internally throughout her career but stepped out of her comfort zone to reach a wider audience within the community. Being part of the BBST training team, speaking at conferences and running workshops and continually learning.


This is an Agile Alliance community blog post. Opinions represented are personal and belong solely to the author. They do not represent opinion or policy of Agile Alliance.

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