To enhance the creativity and motivation of the team, some companies allow their employees to use a portion of the working hours in order to concentrate on personal projects.

This practice is the brainchild of William L. McKnight of 3M in the 50s. Granting 15% of the time working to develop personal projects proves to be a winning idea. This way of conceiving the work is taken up and adapted by some companies including Google, Atlassian, LinkedIn, Apple and others.

Atlassian, the leading provider of software (including JIRA) for product development teams, for example introduced 20% time to stimulate the creativity of its employees. The program aimed was to foster creativity, experience, improve difficult situations to face in developer daily routine and above all have some fun. Prior to 20% time, Atlassian started a program called ShipIt days. The idea was to demonstrate creativity within 24 hours to build a product that would be relevant to the product as well as the customer.

Continuing with the tradition, Atlassian started an annual event called the Atlassian Summit. This event is aimed at making convey to users and partners the latest news about the development of the company and its products, listen to the leaders speeches and of course to communicate with each other.

The event was a great success last year and Atlassian put out an announcement about their upcoming 5^th conference called the Atlassian Summit 2013 to be hosted in San Francisco, CA, United States, from October 1 – 3, 2013. At Atlassian Summit 2013, participants will gain insight and tips on how to dial in Atlassian products with proven practices and new technologies, driving team to new heights. In addition, there is five more reason the Atlassian Summit 2013 would be worth attending.

The three days sessions are broken into the following tracks – Development Teams, Team Collaboration, Massive Teams, Inside Atlassian and the Ecosystem.

Inside Atlassian

Atlassian teams have great variation in size, locations, technologies and work processes. The summit will showcase how each team bands together to deliver excellent customer experiences in terms of new product launches, and new features. Further you have access to various Atlassian staff, gurus and so forth to answer any further questions you might have.

Inside the Ecosystem

For both corporate developers and commercial Marketplace developers, the summit will help developers to learn about advances in Atlassian’s Development platform (APIs, Frameworks, SDK, etc.) and start building better apps.

This would be a great opportunity to hear from other developers and customers from all sorts of industries and listen to how they are implementing and using Atlassians products.

Product Training

The product training session straight from Atlassian themselves will help devs, admins and project managers improve the quality and efficiency of their teams. The summit will be a great opportunity to ask questions and explore mastering Git workflows, optimizing build infrastructure and adapting Agile practices in your environment.

Industry & Best Practices Panels

Industry experts will give insight on adopting Git in the Enterprise, Agile best practices, and more. The featured Summit speakers include Jim O’Neill, CIO, Hubspot; Nick Muldoon, Agile & Dev Productivity, Twitter; Scott Farquhar, Co-founder & CEO, Atlassian; Mike Cannon-Brookes, Co-founder & CEO, Atlassian; David Mittman Supervisor, Planning & Execution, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and many more.

Dan Radigan of Atlassian JIRA team also shared in a blog post that this year at Summit, the company will have an equally amazing session on how the JIRA team fosters an innovative engineering culture through the use of ShipIt days and 20% time. Nick Menere, an engineering manager who has been on the JIRA, will provide insight into tips and tales of JIRA that will help you make the world of software development a better place.

Future State of the Unions

This session will explore product roadmaps from the JIRA, Confluence, and dev tools product teams. It is always great to listen to other players in the I.T industry to see where they see the future of the industry going.

Like all previous summit, there will be a floor run by sponsors whom are showing off their shiny products that boost and build on the existing Atlassian products.

Sign-up for Atlassian Summit today! and register from here.