Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) Conference, co-founded in 2000 by gerald-weinberg, esther-derby, and johanna-rothman. An experiential learning conference focused on the human side of software — leadership, communication, team dynamics, and personal effectiveness.
Format and Philosophy
AYE was deliberately small and workshop-based, contrasting sharply with the large-keynote model of most industry conferences. Participants chose sessions that ran for hours, not the forty-five-minute slots of typical conferences. The workshops used experiential techniques drawn from the PSL (Problem Solving Leadership) workshop tradition and from virginia-satir's therapeutic methods — participants didn't just hear about congruent-behavior or the moi-model, they practiced them in facilitated exercises.
The conference embodied Weinberg's belief that software improvement requires personal and interpersonal growth, not just process improvement. This made AYE unusual in the software conference landscape: it was attended by testers, developers, managers, and consultants, all working on the same problems from different perspectives. The cross-pollination between these roles was a design feature, not an accident.
Community Function
Beyond its sessions, AYE served as the annual gathering point for the community of practitioners shaped by Weinberg's ideas. james-bach, michael-bolton, cem-kaner, don-gray, fiona-charles, naomi-karten, and many others were regular participants and session leaders. The conference generated amplifying-your-effectiveness-2000, a collected volume of essays from the community, and it was the social infrastructure through which Weinberg's ideas about programming-as-human-activity, satir-change-model, and the helpful-model-of-consulting were transmitted to a new generation of practitioners.
The conference ran annually for many years and was one of the primary channels through which Weinberg's thinking reached the Agile and testing communities.