From 2012, this post was written by co-founder of LAST Conferences, Ed.

LAST Day Melbourne is a one day, low cost, grassroots mini-conference for Lean, Agile, and Systems Thinking practitioners. The day will be structured to allow participation and interaction via workshops and activities, rather than death by projector.

Regular readers will remember my writeup about Agile Tour Sydney. That article had a call to action, regarding doing something along the same lines, here in Melbourne.

When I got back, I was able to enthuse Craig Brown, a fellow co-organiser in the Melbourne Meetup scene and we’ve been working on the idea for the last couple of months.

Originally, we wanted to do something really rapidly, holding the event in March, or even February. The Agile Tour is held between October and December, and I just couldn’t wait that long for Melbourne to have its turn.

Reality stepped in though, as we realised that we probably needed a little time to clear the New...

Updated 15 August with 10 Year Reflections sessions info.

Happy birthday to us!

Ten years ago, today…150 adventurous folks gathered at Swinburne for the first, LAST Conf. The collage above has some of only a few decent photos I could find from 27 July 2012. To see a bunch of photos from LAST Conferences over the years, go look at this Flickr Group and this Google Photos album.

There have been thousands of participants, hundreds of session leaders, dozens of volunteers and helpers, plus numerous companies that have sustained the events. Thanks to all of them, even if we haven't managed to name you all below.

The origins of LAST and some other notes

2012-2016

Prior to the 2012 first edition, one of the co-founders did a writeup about why LAST Conference was started. It took inspiration from the burgeoning meetup community, founded by Martin Kearns, in Melbourne and also the first edition in 2011 of Agile Tour Sydney, organised by Jeremie Benazra....

LAST in 2020

Since March 2020, we have delivered a programme of over 50 talks, 90-min workshops, longer courses and mini-conferences…all online. These were presented by over 70 people from Australia, Asia, Canada, the USA and Europe.

Presenters included Barry O'Reilly, Diana Larsen, Prof. Mike Steger, Hugh Mackay AO, John Cutler, Nigel Dalton, Dr Elise Bialylew, Jeff Patton, Kazuyoshi Hisano, Norman Bodek, Dr Zach Mercurio and many more.

Free Members were able to join many of the live sessions, with many of the recordings being available in the free library for a limited time. You can view a Preview of the sessions and also join for free, to access what is in the Free Library. We also have a Slack group that has over 2000 members. Come and find your people.

If you're not at least a free member of the LAST Club, you're missing out!

JOIN FOR FREE

Full Members were those who chose to go more in-depth for one or both of the "seasons" of the LAST Club. Some...

We all know that predicting the future is difficult, and the events of the last year has reinforced this even more. Despite this, we still have to make plans for the future and that's what we have been thinking about, lately.

It would be easy to say that because we are doing relatively well here in Australia that we can go back to how we ran things in 2019, in 2021. We aren't going to rush things though, so here's where the current thinking from me is.

We need the community's support

If you have been to and enjoyed LAST/1st and Spark the Change in the past, or one of the 2020 LAST Anywhere or Clubhouse sessions, we really need your support in the next few months…particularly if you are able to become a Full Member.

Please consider joining as a Full Member, and just as importantly please get involved. The enthusiasm and involvement to make the LAST Club something more than just a series of webinars, is really important and it also matches the ethos of...