APLN chapters in Latinamerica

Back last June I came up with the idea of staring an APLN chapter in Mexico. After talkng about it with several people in both the USA--at the BayAPLN mainly David Chilcott and Cesar Idrovo--and Mexico (polling people to see how much enthusiasm there is about it) I decided to go for it. Coincidentally an agilist from Costa Rica, David Alfaro, contacted BayAPLN in October and so we held a teleconference USA-Mex-CR (since I was in Mexico on business those days) to brainstorm how to get those chapters started. I suggested David A and I to keep in close contact to share experiences and help each other out in addition to getting coaching from David C and Cesar.

Then in November I had the opportunity to meet a group of Brazilians let by Guilherme Chapiewski, who were in San Francisco for the QCon conference, and invited them to the BayAPLN meeting to be held the following day (talk about good timing). They all attended and loved it. Guilherme told me he would like to get a chapter started in Brazil.

Long story short, David A has been actively increasing awareness on agile in Costa Rica and is working towards getting the first meeting. We learned that a chapter in Brazil was started a while back but didn't succeed and current efforts are towards re-starting it. From my side the first MexAPLN (unofficial for now) took place on Dec 8th in Mexico City and was a great start, with 8 executives from diverse enterprises attending.

Several ideas I have in mind are:

• Leveraging the fact that we have close relationship with BayAPLN (with me now being part of the Coordinating Committee) to figure out ways to help those chapters get up and running.
• Growing the MexAPLN to become the prime chapter in Latinamerica
• Create a latinamerican APLN metachapter to have higher impact in that geographical area and organize world-class events.