Date:	3 Jan 2008
Time:	1800h(GMT-5)
Location:	Phone
In attendance:	Linda Cook George Dinwiddie Hillel Glazer

Since APLN-MD and GBSPIN are co-operating, these minutes apply equally to GBSPIN (and, frankly, can be credited with why GBSPIN was started).

Agreed to the following:

Topics:

3 main topic areas, will try to rotate through them on a quarterly basis:

• Project... leadership, managing, human factors, planning, execution, monitoring, life cycles, cadence, velocity, rhythm, sprints, iterations, etc.
• Product... design, testing, functionality, architecture, technology, tools, increments, integration, code control and sharing, refactoring, etc.
• Process... lean, improvement, definition, sufficiency, adequacy, CMMI, culture, etc.

Meeting Planning:

(GOAL) Will plan on a rolling quarterly basis, at least 3 months of meetings planned in advance.

• Meetings announcements will go out announcing 3 months of meetings.
• 2-3 meetings will always be open to registration at any given time.
• Within a week of each meeting, the next three meetings will be known.
• Calendar will roll forward each month with the next three months of meetings.
• May consider reusing topics when location changes from meeting to meeting.

Meeting location and times/days:

• Important to keep meetings on the same day of the week, preferably on the same week of the month.
• Location can move around. Goal is to re-use the same locations on a rotating basis.
• Locations should be easy to get to and centrally located at/near Baltimore/Columbia corridor.
• Let's get out of the "catering" business.
• Goal is to find venues where location and food are the same place and build into price. Price point (target): $25/person.
• Agreed to see which places work out best before settling on locations or frequency.
• Possibly use 3 locations and rotate on quarterly basis.
• When date or location must change, we should never be less than 3 months away from the change, so advanced notice, planning, and warning will be sufficient.

Merged Operations with SPIN (SEI "chapters"):

• Agile and CMMI share goals, albeit their means and maybe their motives are different.
• Neither Agile nor CMMI are right or wrong, there are only good and bad implementations of either.
• Bringing APLN and SPIN together can only be a good thing, if "produced" by the right people.
• Neither will go away any time soon, thus, helping each community understand the other is necessary and can't be avoided.
• It would be a service to both communities to have them understand each other and cooperate.

Next Meetings and Topics/Presenters/Location:

• Jan 15th: Learning to Identify Waste/Linda Cook/TBD.
• Feb 19th: How to do CMMI so it doesn't kill you/Hillel Glazer/TBD.
• Mar 25th: TBD

Next Steps:

• Hillel and Linda to research locations.
• Hillel to finalize Feb topic.
• Full leadership to brainstorm for March topic.
• Linda, George and Hillel to speak again Friday 4 Jan to ID location and topic(s).

Submitted by Hillel