Improve knowledge, share passion breaking down silos b/w workgroups

The 21st of July 2015, I have participated such as organizer, tutor and speaker at the first dojo event organized by SCAI Consulting.

This initiative was born because I think that in a small organization or in a big company, the communication and collaboration between people is a very big value.

I have often seen each workgroup on a specific set of projects or products, the communication is only inside a team and often the people between different teams do not know each other.

In this scenario, each workgroup is a silo… and its focus is only for single areas of expertise.

Starting from these assumptions I thought to create a dojo  and meet  my colleagues with the aim  to communicate with them and share passions, ideas, knowledge, solutions and break down the silos between workgroups.

What means dojo?

Dojo is a Japanese word which indicates a place where take place practices of martial arts and where you can reach the perfect unity between the mind and body and therefore the perfect psychophysical balance.

For a developer have a place where is free to learn without the work and project constraints can be useful and an help… a developer often has a hard life and too little time to study and improve his knowledge.

But not only… The dojo is an attitude

During a dojo we are not colleagues and there are not corporate hierarchies. We become people who are free to meet and share the same passions, ideas, technologies, solutions…

How did we organized?

Every month, we open a call for paper where each person can suggest a topic or a list of topics (the topics are usually about technology, methodology, business, experiences, etc..) then the topics are voted from the participants.

Topics top rated are discussed at the next dojo and each proposal can be discussed with a presentation, a tutorial, pair programming sessions or finding new ways to learn … Enjoy ! 🙂

We use Trello to organize and plan the dojo events…

In the first dojo event we have discussed about MongoDB for Developers, if you want to know more about this, please you can see my slides on slideshare.

If you want to know more about me, please visit my linkedin profile or  follow me on twitter (@CyrusD87)