Agile Voices Finally

Nearly 6 months ago I saw another Top 20 list of Agile people. I was troubled. As a result I started an anti top 100 list: from Looking for 100 Agile Voices we should hear more from.

In the past few years a number of Agile people I respect have published top 100 or even top 200 lists. While I, like many others, appreciate the attention they’ve brought, the whole idea seems very anti-agile. Agile promotes a democratic meritocracy. These lists do the opposite, they create “heroes” - people whose ideas are more important others. Instead, I think we should be widely read in the Agile community, often reaching outside our immediate realm. To that end I’m asking for your help creating a list of voices we should hear more from. My goal is find ~100, the limit is more from my time and energy than the lack of more people we could find.

I naively assumed that once this went “live” I would be flooded with names. The first few came in rapidly, and they’ve trickled in on and off ever since. Well, the list has now reached 70 people; I’ve long since had my minimum viable product, but summer and family time intervened.

As a reminder – my simple rules for inclusion are:

• Nominees have to have a track record of doing something Agile for at least a year
• Not be in the Top 100 of any previous list
• The list isn’t sorted - no one is more important than anyone else
• I’m most interested in people who write about their experiences, either good or bad
• Please don’t suggest yourself

There is no order to this scrollable list.

I know that the table formatting is a bit of an issue – I will fix this when I have a chance.

I know several people don’t have blogs or Twitter IDs listed, so I can’t find them; I’m hoping this post will encourage them to come out of the woodwork.

As I find new names and new blogs I will update the list periodically. Thanks to the many people who helped make this happen.

Image attribution: Agile Pain Relief