Every now and then, Lero- The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre organises industry days, where researchers talk about their work with Irish practitioners. The one we had today happened in Dublin, and was hosted by Enterprise Ireland in its East Point premises in Dublin. It was organised in connection with the conference we are hosting this summer at UL – the International Conference on Global Software Engineering, for which I happen to be the local organisation chair.
(Photos by Jack Downey, the Lero Industry officer whose organisation efforts made the event possible.)
The event included 3 talks and time for networking and discussions; there were approx 30 attendees.The detailed programme can be found here.
Dr.Ita Richardson spoke about the need for extending standards like CMMI and ISO15504 to include guidelines for Global Software Development and regulated industries such as medical devices.
My talk was a reflection on the role of collaborative practices such as informal communication, socialisation and cultural mediation. I introduced the socGSD project. I spoke a bit about my field sites and the use of ethnographic methods. I shared with the audience a number of stories on things as banal as using instant messaging, Skype and social networking applications in day-to-day collaboration between distributed team members. No matter how banal they look like, a lot of managers don’t seem to understand yet their role as the glue that brings people together and allows them to create rapport. I concluded with a few recommendations, emphasizing the role of direct and frequent communication between sites, flexibility in organisational practices and cultural mediation. I got very positive feedback after the talk – several participants came to me to tell me how they resonated with the things I spoke about.
The third speaker was Vikas Sahni of Softedge Systems and it was great to hear from a practitioner how some of the things I touched upon in my talk were seen from the other side. One point where Vikas disagreed with me was cultural mediation and the role of people who can bridge different cultures. He gave the example of an Indian project manager based in Ireland who had difficulties in syncronising with his developers in India, while an Irish project manager was getting excellent results with an Indian team. In my view, this proves the danger of generalisation and of talking about “good practices”.
What works in one case can fail in another, because software is developed by people, and most problems are not connected to technology, but to people, to paraphrase Tom DeMarco. Not everyone can be a cultural mediator – it is a matter of people skills and personality. Next week, my colleague Alexander Boden will present our joint paper and poster on the topic of cultural mediation at the CHASE workshop collocated with ICSE’09 in Vancouver.
It was a wonderful sunny day, so after contemplating the idea of seeing the Bodies exhibition, I followed an impulse I had since the day I first arrived in Dublin – to get on an open bus and do the tourist tour.
I hoped off in Stephen’s Green and sat on the grass for a while, and then hopped back on. I was planning to see a film at the IFI, but because the bus got stuck in traffic, I got off in Heuston and returned to Limerick.
Thanks to Twitter again and to the serendipity it creates, I came across a talk titled “Fake Ethnography vs. Real Ethnography” by Aviva Rosenstein from the User Research Friday held in San Francisco last November.
And James Kalbach did a great job summarising it on his blog!
This is an ongoing debate: do researchers from other domains than anthropology really do ethnography? Or we should only speak about “using ethnographic methods”?
In our project, even if we did field studies during extended periods of time, we preferred to state that we used “ethnographically-informed” methods. Anyhow, Rosenstein makesthe point in the conclusion of her talk: if you are stating your possible bias, you are collecting data (instead of recording assumptions), you’re treating your informants well and you’re also observing what they actually do without relying entirely on what they say they do, if you are trying to understand things at a deeper level, look for patterns and write the whole thing down, you are doing decent research employing ethnographic methods. In the end, the measure of success is delivering some value to the organisation you’re working with!
I loved the advice she gave to researchers : mix and match, be creative and resourceful bricoleurs, make mistakes and tell the others about them, and… be brave!
The talk rang a big bell to me – it is so difficult to walk on this narrow path when there’s criticism everywhere, and so good to hear some words of encouragement!
“Here’s a clever way to do a conference: make it short (four hours), make it entertaining (fast, opinionated presentations), do it in a bar. User Research Friday, hosted by Bolt Peters in SF, has used this formula to great effect a couple of times so far, most recently on November 7, when six speakers in the design research field kept 140 of their colleagues spellbound, then stuck around for drinks.”
Really – an interesting idea!
I tried to retrieve the tweets from the event – there’s a twitter feed on the screen during the final sequences of the video, and Bolt | Peters mentions #URF08 as hashtag, but summize doesn’t seem to find anything. An application for extracting and archiving event Twitter feeds anyone?!
I went to the Limerick OpenCoffee Club this morning. I could afford this luxury, as the semester is over- no more teaching on Thursdays- and my contract ended anyhow.
We had quite a few of new attendees, and I tried to play the host. Don’t think I succeeded very well, because I was too nervous thinking of the 1000 different things I had to postpone doing for going there! But anyhow, after 10 min and 2 urgent mails sent, I managed to sink into the relaxed atmosphere…
Elaine Rogers from Seefin Coaching spoke about Time Management, and
John Gleeson from the University of Limerick (UL) spoke about Technology Transfer.
I had my laptop with me, and instead of taking notes, I felt like twittering what was going on. Read from the bottom up if you want to make any sense of it!These are all the tweets under #LOCC during those hours!
The funny part was that Ger Hartnett read my tweet about Elaine’s slide with a list of time wasters, and asked if Twitter was on the list. I presented Elaine with the comment (in almost real time), and she confessed she avoided it on purpose… because herself spends a lot of time on Twitter.
gabig58#LOCC Partner with researchers and research groups, make your skill sets known to UL, suggest interesting problems, tap into EI support about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58omg! 5 new followers in the last 20 min, just because I’m tweeting from #LOCC! Thank you! Hope my battery won’t fail me! about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC For companies looking for collaboration with universities,have a look at Innovation Vouchers and Innovation Partnerships(EI funded) about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC John Gleeson’s role at UL is to facilitate university – industry linkages and research commercialisation about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC A bit of history – the establishment of UL in 1972, a picture of the White House and one of the Living Bridge about 19 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC if procrastination is taking up,and you spend your day on Twitter, FB,YouTube -your body is actually telling you it’s time for a break about 20 hours ago from web
gabig58#LOCC The mayonese jar story:you can put the golf balls in,the pebbles and the sand -but there’s always space left for a cuppa with a friend about 20 hours ago from web
And then I ran home to finish my slides for the Lero Industry Day on Monday.
In the evening, I went to an event organised by the Limerick County Enterprise Board: a talk by Brody Sweeney, the man behind O’Briens Sandwich Bars, titled “The real way to start up and stay in business”. The talk was the most inspiring event I went to lately! Brody spoke with extreme honesty about the problem he faced along the way, the sometimes unorthodox approaches he had to take, and what really counts. What really counts are people and hard work – and this struck a chord in me! We’ve heard the same thing from Patrick Collison at the OpenCoffee almost a year ago – there’s really hard work behind any successful business!
And the message we all took home was that there’s an opportunity in every apparently bad thing that’s happening to us – and the current recession is no exception! So I’ll try to get up smiling tomorrow morning, start with my best foot and see the hidden opportunities behind all this apparent doom and gloom everybody seems to be whining about!
I had in plan to go to Bizcamp Dublin ever since I heard it was going to happen. On the very morning I felt dead tired and didn’t want to get out of bed, but in the end I managed. And wasn’t sorry: the day was great value! It was worth it spending 7h on the bus just to be there!
They decided to have a fixed schedule for the day, which was available for download before the event. Usually at barcamps we have a board with post-its that can be shuffled and re-shuffled many times during the day, but I was so grateful the bizcamp Dublin organisers gave us a printed schedule to serve us as a guide during the day!
I was late in the morning, so I missed Aileen Hannan‘s talk“Practical Finances for Entrepreneurs”. Even if I had the chance to listen to her at Barcamp Cork and I’m reading her blog, I still regretted it.
I went to the Dan Barry talk “Legal issues facing start-up businesses“ – I found it excellent, to the point, full of very practical advice.
I hesitated between Niall Harbison‘s talk “Marketing and Growing Your Start-Up” (I am a real fan of Niall and a great admirer of the way he uses social media!) and Yanky Fachler‘s “Using chutzpah (balls, brass neck) to get through closed doors”. I must confess the subtitle “The emotional transition from employee to self employed” made me go to Yanky’s talk- the talk was nice and entertaining, but it didn’t do anything for me. He didn’t speak specifically about this transition, but rather shared anecdotes about how some of today’s success people started.
It was the first time I had the chance to listen to Emily Tully in person (I visited her blog though!) – her talk on “Self Promotion/ how to use PR and the media to your advantage” was excellent. She spoke about things such as having different press releases for old and new media, being honest and thinking about your audience.
During lunch everybody had the chance to meet old acquaintances and make new ones. I’ve done a brief survey regarding the interest in having a 3Dcamp at UL in June (looks like we should do it!) and interviewed this young fellow who didn’t seem at ease among so many adults. He told me all he’d like to see at Bizcamp Limerick – I hope we can live up his expectations!
The afternoon started with a panel discussion moderated impetuously byPatricia O’Sullivan : Successful Fundraising. 5 people sharedtheir experience in obtaining funds for their start-ups: Caelen King from RevaHealth.com, Niall Harbison – lookandtaste.com, Campbell Scott from IGOPeople, Keith Bohanna – dbTwang, and Ciaran Crean – MicksGarage. They were joined by two advisors from Enterprise Ireland. I wish the panel would have been given a bit more time – they all had interesting things to say, and the room was buzzing with energy.
I was tempted to join the Battle of the Biz session run by Robin Blandford after that, but I decided it’d be better to learn something about branding. Gerard Tannam‘s session “Branding Your Start-Up From The Get-Go” was probably the highlight of the whole Bizcamp for me: straight to the point, informative, practical and stimulating. I had several “eureka” moments during that talk – it was really worth it! The interesting thing was that the room was completely packed – either people have developed a nose for quality sessions, or they deserted the Battle of the Biz after it was explained to them.
I returned to the big room just in time to catch a presentation by one of the competing teams and couldn’t make much sense of the presence on stage of 5 young ladies who seemed to have been got there by accident!
I wanted to listen to Chris Byrne, but he didn’t make it up from Cork. The final session I say in was run by Jane Hogan and Sean Kirwan . Both of them spoke about how to increase your sales – a lot of enthusiasm, but to my taste they sounded a bit like the network marketing talks I used to listen to in the late 90s. If you take away the enthusiasm, there’s not much substance left!
It’s amazing how the span of attention is almost unlimited during such events! I’ve never got bored at any unconference type event – there are so many interesting people to talk to and speakers to listen to, that it is difficult to divide your time. Could we do something similar in academia? Have one day a month when anybody can volunteer to give a talk, and allow the students to go wherever they want…
..or how I managed to get dead frozen selling Romanian language lessons on Bedford Row on Saturday;)
A year ago, I found out about the existence of an organisation meant to bring together the Romanians living in Limerick. I started going to their monthly meetings whenever I could find the time, and I met very interesting people from all the paths of life there. At the first IRCBA meeting this year- I heard about the Excursions Performance festival and the “Sell your language” happening organised by Ania Bas as part of it. Me and my colleague Daniela Butan decided to give it a try.
We found Ania (who is Polish) and Helena Zelesakova (Slovakian) on Bedford Row, and we joined them. I must say that the “would you like to buy a language?” approach didn’t suit me, so I kind of turned it into “would you like to buy a language lesson?”. Daniela and I offered 5 min Romanian language lessons for 1 eur – a rather competitive price, taking into account that Slovak and Polish lessons cost 1.50 and 2 euros!
A lot of bypassers didn’t pay any attention to us, but quite a few asked for more detail, and a few accepted our offer. It was interesting to see how perfect Romanian pronounciation someone can achieve in just 5 minutes!
I didn’t make any money on the day, but I managed to learn some Irish in exchange!
I would have loved to see a lot more people involved in teaching their own language – the mix of languages offered was exclusively East European, while there’s such a variety of people coming from different corners of the world living in Limerick!
This created a lot of buzz and the idea of organising a BarCamp focusing on entrepreneurship and start-ups
Then, I came across Stephen Kinsella’s post and listened to the podcast- he was talking about a University initiative group. It occurred to me that we should join forces, so I drew his attention to the LOCC idea.
Twitter did the rest. Other people jumped in, so on January 23, we met in UL for the first time to discuss how, when, where, who. Why was obvious: trying to turn a bad thing around… The discussion started with Stephen Kinsella, Hughie Tiernan, Bernie Goldbach and myself around the table. David Quaid, Evert Bopp, Ger Hartnett and Shane McAllister joined us shortly. We were all buzzing with great ideas about speakers, sessions, advertising and so on. The only problem we had was with the date: Stephen had already made a provisory booking of the lecture hall and break-out rooms in the Kemmy Business School. And the date was March 7. Bernie told us he just spoke to Keith Bohanna and that was the date they had picked up for Bizcamp Dublin. A short conversation with Keith on the phone, a tentative of bringing the Dublin Bizcamp to Limerick alltogether, the frightening spectrum of having two competing events on the same day, a check of the rugby calendar, and we agreed to move the event to March 21. Dellcamp became Bizcamp Limerick!
We went to see the facilities and everybody was impressed by the new KBS building.
Stephen Kinsella has the whole story in this blogpost.
Last night I went to the Daghdha space in St John’s Square to attend a talk by a Finnish scholar. Dr. Jaana Parviainen from the University of Tampere spoke about: “The Crisis of Knowledge: How We Know In and Through the Moving Body”. The talk was preceded by a dance performance.
I love going to Daghdha – it has a very special atmosphere (hosted in an old church I’ve spoken about before) . Imagine a big hall with pilars, cosy sofas, armchairs, bean bags and blankets, book shelves, intimate lights and hot tea served.
Jaana spoke about her early training in the Martha Graham‘s dance style, and how she didn’t quite enjoy the experience. This rang a bell to me, I had to study ballet for ten years because one of our neighbours used to run a ballet school. At some point, I even considered the idea of becoming a ballerina. I can’t say I hated it – and it definitely left some traces – I not only love watching dance performances, I also happen to dance now and then around the house .
Jaana didn’t end up being a dancer either – she studied Languages and Philosophy and wrote a PhD thesis about dance from a philosophical perspective. Nowadays she is working with a group doing organisational studies that focus on the role of the body language and body movements in an organisation.
Her talk triggered several ideas and questions in my mind:
She spoke about bodies “moving and being moved” – yes, sometimes we behave as we’re supposed to in an organisation, and our bodies “are moved”, in a way, by the organisation’s rules, by other people’s actions and by social conventions; Jaana also mentioned the gestures and habits we’re inheriting from parents and other family members. But my thoughts went toward massage therapies – how the therapist is moving someone else’s body (osteopaths manipulating joints and muscles), or her own hands on the client’s body, listening to her intuition and trying “to see” where the pain hides.
Moving and being moved – how does this apply to an unconference type event? Just imagine a choreographer looking at a BarCamp event: attendees congregating around the timetable and disappearing into different rooms. The whole interaction in the rooms: one-two speakers, the audience, members of the audience becoming the centre of attention, everybody turning around on their chairs, people discovering old aquaintances in the back of the room and exchanging a smile – what a fascinating “ballet”!
How do people move in a work environment? Are their trajectories relevant? During my observation period in a large open plan full of cubicles, I learnt they are. I went in with the pre-conception that there will be nothing to observe, because people speak to each other mainly through their computers. And I was proved so wrong! People are walking to each other desks to ask a question, to share important news, to suggest a break for a discussion. People stand up to look around and see if someone is at his desk. Some people push their chairs around, some others tend to sit on their colleagues’ desks and make a tour of the team. When someone important is visiting, the rythm and the sound of the whole space is changing.
How is distributed collaboration affected by the lack of movement and space awareness? People tend to assume that their counterpart works in a similar place, in similar conditions- and this is most of the times false! People tend to guess each other’s reactions in call conferences. People in the same room express through gestures unknown to their counterparts. Is a video channel a solution to this? I don’t think so, although it is very useful in some circumstances.
Negative knowledge was another interesting idea brought into discussion: being aware of what you don’t know, being aware of what you sshould avoid doing and of the consequences of not succeeding. Social media seems to have a very important role in raising this kind of awareness: I discover every day things I didn’t know – and wasn’t even aware of their existence! We also tend to know more about actions considered a no-no and about failures due to blogs nowadays.
And today, Jaana, together with Steve Valk and a group of members of the Daghdha Dance Company paid a visit to us in the Interaction Design Centre. It was great to have them around and talk about our work with them. Who knows?! Maybe it’s the beginning of an interesting collaboration!
A frosty afternoon… Nowadays I have to leave the university shortly before 5pm, otherwise it’s too dark to cycle by the Shannon
When I got into town, it was 5:10 – the exact time indicated by one of our colleagues for watching the sky and see Venus and Jupiter next to the New Moon.
The lights of the city and my own clumsiness in using the camera didn’t let me get a perfect picture of what I saw – but this one is nice enough – you can see Venus very clearly on the right bottom part of the Moon! Jupiter was there as well
An explanation of the phenomenon can be found here. I must say I had tears in my eyes because of the cold and I kept wondering if it wasn’t a simple illusion…
From all the places in the world I have worked in, the University of Limerick is by far the best. There are many reasons for this: the people, the campus, the cross-department collaboration atmosphere, the personal development programs and workshops, the lunchtime concerts. And last but not least, the events where we meet to exchange information and ideas about how to improve our teaching and the students’ learning. Every time I feel unhappy about how my teaching progresses, all I have to do is to attend one of these events and find out I am not the only one who encountered that problem, and learn how other people have solved it.
On Friday, after the last lecture of the semester and two other meetings, I attended a “Teaching on the Go” session organised by the Technology Enhanced Learning group in UL.
Stephen Kinsella from KBS gave a talk titled: “Many to one: Using the mobile phone to interact with large classes“. Since this is one of my major problems – how to interact with a large class during the 50 min I get with them, I thought I might pick up something from Stephen’s experience.
The talk was excellent – short and to the point – and Stephen invited the participants to join his efforts. He developed the app himself – using a cheap mobile phone and Java. He is teaching a really large class – 500 people attend his lectures in the Concert Hall. At specific points during his lecture, he asks his students for questions or comments. The messages are projected on the large screen and everybody can read them. Sometimes he gets highly relevant questions, that allow him to explain specific terms or clarify issues. Some other times he gets irrelevant stuff, or even bad language. The phone numbers are always on the screen, so he can call back the number and expose the person. But most of the students understand the rules of the game and use this opportunity for real dialogue.
Stephen is now working with a couple of Indian developers on developing a web version of his application.
The excellent thing about this solution is that it is simple, affordable and the messages stay in a closed circle. My worry about the Jaiku experiment I ran last year was that I was polluting all my other contacts with the messages I was sending to the students. In one way, this was good, because it allowed synergies to occur (like my collaboration with Bernie), but at the same time some of the students might have been put off by this transparency.
My guilt feeling for not blogging was fueled even more by Stephen’s statement that he has reached 1000 blog posts! After checking his blog, I realised it’s an excellent illustration of what good teaching enhanced by technology can do! All his lectures are available online – exactly what was suggested by my students last year (and I thought they were asking too much!)
Someone else in the room mentioned Clicker and a trial they are involved in. It’s amazing how much can you learn from your peers in an environment like UL! People from different departments come together and share their experiences and you always leave the event with new ideas and having made new acquaintances!
My paper made it into one of the most important conferences in our field, the International Conference on Global Software Engineering, that happened in Munich between 27 and 31 August.
During lunch, I made a terrible faux pas when I sat down at the same table with Phillippe Kruchten who was in the middle of his lunch. I read his name tag and as my excitment was bursting, the only line I could find after “Hello, nice to meet you!” was: “we’re reading your papers!” He was very nice answering: “and I’m reading your papers too! I had to read all the 100+ submissions…” The truth is I had discovered one of his papers only the week before, and it served me very well to make a point in my ECKM’07 paper, so for me it was a wonderful coincidence and all I meant was to thank him… but then I made a complete fool of myself!
My colleague Anders introduced me to Frances Paulisch, the host and the good fairy of the conference. Frances introduced me to Daniela Damian (again, what a difference between exchanging emails and talking on Skype from being face-to-face!) Daniela introduced me to some of her students – I remember meeting Sabrina Marczak on that occasion.
A welcome reception at the Hilton City Munich followed on the same evening.
On Tuesday, instead of a keynote, there was an opening session including “two important papers”-as introduced by the organisers. Their topics – text-based communication in distributed requirements workshops and respectively the relationship between time zone separation and performance – were of great interest and therefore they were vividly discussed by the audience during the following breaks.
An Experience session, containing only papers from the industry, followed.
Before introducing the keynote speaker, Phillipe Kruchten presented some statistics: there were 100 submissions, out of which 29 were accepted; 156 participants were 60 from Germany, 22 from the US, 9 from the Netherlands, 8 from Finland, 5 from Canada, 4 from India, 3 from Japan. There were supposed to be 2 more Irish, but they didn’t make it till the end.
25% of the participants were from academia, 35% from the industry, 19% came from research, 5% were consultants and 16% belonged to“other categories”. Strange enough, not a single person from this last category could be identified…
Then “Herr Professor Doktor” Erran Carmel delivered his keynote speech, “Reflections on a Decade of Studying Global Software Engineering“. A poster session followed – only 3 posters were presented, and unfortunately the Irish IBMers who were co-authors of one of them couldn’t be there. Kate Ehrlich and Prof.Marilyn Tremaine had to stand next to it, explaining the work that had been done.
Sabrina Marczak from PUCRS, and a group of students from TU Munich(under the supervision of Marilyn Tremaine) were the authors of the other two.
In the afternoon, we had a session dedicated to Quality and Performance. Two very different talks. Rajesh Agarval from TCS presented the solution found by his company for motivating their developers to work as quality engineers as well. The other speaker was Timo Poikolainen from Nokia – and again, the audience had the chance to hear about successes and failures with thorough openness, as always when someone from Nokia is giving a presentation.
The session organized for students in the evening included two parts:
–In the first part, J.Sauer from Hamburg University presented the results of a survey he has undertaken on the particular difficulties of research in the GSE domain. It was interesting to listen to the student introductions – it gave you an idea of the differences between research settings in different countries.
–In the second part, Harold Ossher from IBM Watson introduced the Jazz Technology platform. Jazz is the result of a collaboration between IBM Rational and IBM Research and is attempting to build a team collaboration platform on top of the Eclipse IDE. Jazz.net – not yet open to the public; a few videos available. Two related research projects based on jazz were presented: one from Victoria University and the other one from University of California, Irvine.
And then the banquet, at the Ratshaus Keller. A lot of nice food and drinks, a magician going around and entertaining people, socializing and networking, and lots of fun.
On Wednesday, it was my turn, and I was extremely nervous. The session was titled Communication, and I was in very good company: Matt Bass from SEI-CMU (actually from Siemens!), and Luis Izquierdo, from the University of Victoria. Luis’s paper was extremely interesting – his methods were also inspired by ethnography, and his field site very similar to ours.
I oscillated between a classical presentation and an unusual one. In the end, I couldn’t resist the temptation – I went for the unusual one. I started with a warning – no figures nor tables in my presentation!
I don’t know what was the impact at the conceptual level – if I managed to convince the audience how important social practices and human actors actually are in a global environment!, but probably my little SouthPark characters have made quite an impression!
On Wednesday afternoon, I had the chance of presenting to the steering committee the Lero proposal of organising ICGSE 2009 in Limerick.
Thursday, the last day of the conference, was shorter. In the morning, the announcement was made that ICGSE 08 is going to take place in Bangalore, India, and ICGSE 09 in Limerick, Ireland.
In the first session, Michael Vax from LUXOFT delivered the keynote speech, substituting his boss who couldn’t come because of visa problems.
The final session was dedicated to Processes and chaired by Daniela Damian. Alberto Avritzer from Siemens Corporate Research presented the Global Software Studio 3.0 project. Our own university was involved in the first and second year in this project, so it was interesting to see how it evolved in the next stage. Fausto Fasano spoke about an experiment on code inspection, while the final presentation (Rafael Prikladnicki from PUCRS) examined different offshoring and onshoring strategies.
It was a very interesting for me to meet in person so many academics and practitioners involved in GSE research. As I said, I was reading their papers, but didn’t have any perception of their personalities. And it was good to see who does the same kind of work in the GSE community. I found a lot of connections with the work of people in Daniela Damian’s group (Luis Izquierdo, Sabrina Marczak) and with Alexander Boden’s research – clearly grounded in CSCW. Let’s hope we can cook a workshop or tutorial together for next year!
I must confess I was very anxious during the conference: we seem to worry a bit too much as a group that our work won’t be well seen by hard core software engineers, who are obviously preferring quantitave studies and experiments to our “soft” qualitative and interpretive approach. The conference proved to me that the community is ready to listen to what we have to say, and we can actually make an important contribution complementing those quantitative approaches.
My ego got nicely massaged on several occasions; for example, Alberto Avritzer greeted me on the first day as we would have known each other – just to find out before the end of the conference that he was reading my blog from time to time! Frederick Zarndt commented at the end of my presentation (with shining eyes and a big smile on his face) that he had experienced as a practitioner all the situations mentioned in the presentation. Frederick gave a tutorial on the first day on “intercultural expectations, misunderstandings and communications” that I unfortunately missed. And then, there was a very touching scene in the lobby on the last day, when a young lady (a Brasilian student volunteer) came to tell me in her hesitant English: “When I’ll grow up, I would like to be like you!”
