IT community from Central Asia: Agile Uzbekistan

Natalya Ni, city — Tashkent, Agile Uzbekistan Community Lead, Linkedin

About the community

Agile Uzbekistan is one of the first IT communities in Uzbekistan. It was founded in early 2020 in Tashkent, with the first launch of a series of offline meetups and an online conference that brought together over 800 participants. The community was created to unite people with the goal of sharing experience and skills in Agile culture.

Our mission is to spread knowledge and practices in the field of Agile. One of the main tasks is mentoring and supporting those who are just starting their journey in the world of agile methodologies.

Community members

Our community is for all IT specialists, as the values of agile methodologies apply to the entire team, from developers to stakeholders. Today, the community has over 1,000 specialists of various levels and directions. The majority are Scrum Masters, project managers, and product owners. It is encouraging that our target audience joins our meetups, whether they are just starting to study Agile practices or are already working in an agile environment.

Events for community members

At the beginning of the community's development, the phrase "Agile for all" was adopted. This is our positioning. We once made the decision that high-quality knowledge and practices should be accessible to everyone. We continue to adhere to this creed.

Our meetups are always open to everyone; however, for practical exercises and workshops, due to limited capacity, pre-registration is required. Among our initiatives: regular meetups in the format of online and offline talks, covering current topics. We call this format Agile Talks.

Another initiative is Agile Breakfasts and open dialogues — informal meetings where problematic cases are discussed.

Lately, we have been transitioning from the talk format to workshops and games, the goal of which is not to acquire theoretical knowledge, but to understand and apply it in practice. Over the past year, we have played several games explaining the values of the Scrum framework and its application, and conducted workshops on retrospectives and more. Additionally, we have started collaborating with universities and training centers.

How the community helps with development

First of all, I would like to thank our friends from the Agile Kyrgyzstan community. They are more experienced, and we borrow some practices from them, as well as conduct joint online initiatives.

Currently, we are on the path to certifications in the Agile world, specifically aiming to help our participants understand the types of certifications and guide them toward professional certifications. Our friends from Kyrgyzstan also help us with this.

Successful projects

Our community does not currently train personnel from scratch, but helps resolve certain professional issues and analyze work cases. Our project Agile Jobs helps people find jobs where agile methodologies are applied.

Furthermore, in terms of large collaborations, we interact with other communities not only in Uzbekistan but also in other countries, such as Agile Kazakhstan, Agile Kyrgyzstan, Kanban Podcast, Pragmatic, and Agile Community Georgia. We are testing and trying to attract experts to conduct certified trainings for us, both offline and online. We have held international panel discussions several times.

Plans

This year, we are reconsidering the shift from talk formats to game-based practices and workshops, studying gamification in Agile for ourselves. We have already begun moving in this direction. However, like many communities, ours is non-commercial and relies entirely on the initiative of volunteers. I would like to express gratitude to the team managing this community in Uzbekistan and to friends from other Agile communities in different countries who support us and share their expertise and initiatives.

Contacts for those who want to join the community or propose collaboration

We are open to collaboration and aim to organize a major Agile conference in Uzbekistan. For all inquiries, please contact us on Telegram: @ni_nataly.