Below in purple is a post from a past attendee at a Hard Times Course I delivered.

I am not sure what to say or how to acknowledge this post. I am very grateful that someone choose to say these things and hope that others will be inspired to do similar things. The other pattern I hope to see more of and encourage others to do the same is to call attention to each others good work. This is social media at it’s best and encourages us all to be better.

Thank you Robert

The real America just stood up

Posted by Robert Merrill on August 29, 2009 under uFunctional Values

Doug Shimp of 3 Back LLC trained me as a Certified ScrumMaster early in 2009. It was some of the best training I’ve ever had.

He’s still training people to be Certified ScrumMasters. But that’s not news.

He’s training people in “Hard Times Detroit” to be Certified ScrumMasters at cost—$249 a pop. That’s news.

I choose to believe that Doug Shimp—not the selfish, short-sighted scoundrels who landed us in this mess, or the politicians who tell us what we want to hear and not the truth, or the journalists who inflame and incite instead of inspire (even when they’re not skewing the truth)—is the real America, and that there are about a half million more where he came from.

Because of that, and by God’s grace (that word gets tossed around a lot—it means “unmerited favor”), we may have a future after all; H1N1 flu, peak oil, eight-month’s-pay-worth-of-debt and climbing (how else do you put $10,000,000,000,000 or 75% of GDP in perspective), climate change, and all. (Sorry if I triggered a stab of fear, or left out the thing that scares you the most).

If you’re a Doug Shimp, please stand up. If you see a Doug Shimp standing, watch, listen, and act.

This past weekend I delivered a Scrum training course to unemployed people in Detroit. The name if this course was “Hard Times ScrumMaster Detroit”. This course has given rise to a concept we are calling HTU “Hard Times University”

HTU’s purpose is to deliver high quality, low cost, open source knowledge, current training, in a community driven way. It has clear to me that large parts of our educational system are simply holding our learning hostage by high price, huge loans and organizational patterns that create barriers to doing it any other way. The people in this course were amazing and the energy to drastically reduce these barriers is there. Expect to hear much more on “Hard Times University” in the upcoming weeks.

2nd

It looks like we have a couple of publishers interested in our book “Advanced Topi cs in Scrum“. Chapter 4 is ready to read and waiting for anyone who wishes to comment on it. Find it here CHAPTER 4