The purpose of Agile Ventures, is to provide a forum for any individual to develop their skills, in particular skills related to software and information technology (IT). In support of this purpose Agile Ventures connects IT & Software professionals with each other and with NonProfit companies and organisations looking for IT & Software solutions.
This purpose is currently achieved by maintaining a web presence at http://agileventures.org and arranging meetings to take place online approximately every four or five hours 24 hours day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. These meetings, or 'Standups and Pair Hookup' meetings are currently capped at 15 minutes in length, are open to anyone, and will generally include a review of what each individual has been working on, anything they are stuck on, and their upcoming plans. When the number of attending individuals is sufficiently large the chair (or 'host') may, in the interests of maintaining the time cap, elect to switch to a review of the main projects currently of interest to the attendees, again in terms of recent activities, blocks and future plans. Once the review has concluded attendees are then free to coordinate project or problem specific meetings, and collaborative working sessions on any of the NonProfit projects currently included in the Agile Venture project list.
Anyone may become a member of AgileVentures by registering via the website.
Meeting chairs (or 'hosts') are selected by mutual agreement amongst members. In the case of any dispute about who will be the chair the meeting attendees may take a vote on who will be the chair, where simple majority voting will apply. In the case of an evenly split vote, the longest serving member will cast a deciding vote.
Projects listed as AgileVentures projects will be NonProfit projects that are committed to open source and open development. Open Source means that computer code and documentation related to the project will be made available publicly through mechanisms such as that provided by web sites such as http://github.com and the AgileVentures site itself. Open Development means that all meetings related to the project will be live streamed over the web using services such as those provided by http://youtube.com and recordings of these live streams will be made available through the AgileVentures website.
The intention is to ensure that at any time, anyone can review the entire history of any project in terms of development action taken, skills and techniques employed and negotiations made. AgileVentures will do its best to ensure that all materials related to each project and presented in such a fashion as to make navigation of those materials simple and straightforward, with the objective that new members can join and participate in a project at any time.
Agile Ventures prefers NonProfit projects, but may also take on other projects given that they adhere to the open source and open development principles. Nothing should prevent individual AgileVentures members or groups of members taking for-profit work on closed source and closed development projects, however the standups and pair hookup meetings should not be used for those projects, since the objective is to ensure that those meetings are completely open and that any discussion of code or procedure can be supported by perusal of the relevant documentation by anyone that has an interest. The intention is to ensure that Agile Ventures provides a forum for education for everyone, and that it does not become restricted to improving the skills of a subset of its members in such a way that others cannot participate in the process.
For-Profit company projects may be undertaken with the consensus of the trustees especially given commitments to "Open Development", "Open Source" and "Social Responsibility".