If you've gone to more than one software development conference in the past couple of years, you've almost certainly witnessed a conference-within-conference type of phenomenon called open space. It's a method of facilitating a meeting between a large group of people and has been steadily increasing its popularity among conferences such as XP, Agile, XP Day, etc.
And, of course, a whole bunch of conferences have never been anything but open space. The Agile Open and CITCON conferences are good examples of just such pure open space events. And I don't remember hearing a single negative comment about these conferences.
This year's Scan-Agile here in Helsinki will be partly open space, too. I'm also co-chair for open space at XP2009 together with Willem van den Ende and we're excited to see open space get more, well, space in this year's conference.
It seems that people are starting to observe what Harrison Owen, a professional conference organizer realized some 25 years ago. No matter how much you try to organize a conference better and better, participants keep on telling you how the best part of the conference was the odd hallway conversation.
This realization led Owen to develop "Open Space Technology", a meeting format that's all about those hallway conversations. People talking about what they're interested in instead of listening to what invited speakers or a program committee decided would be interesting.
Open space is not just for big international conferences, mind you. In fact, it has worked wonders as a medium for company internal meetings as well. We had our first internal open space event at Reaktor Innovations already god-knows-how-long ago and some of our clients have organized internal open space conferences, too, ranging from a few dozen to several hundred participants, and some of which we've been invited to participate.
I've uploaded some photos from one of our internal events. Check them out - I think you'll find the atmosphere quite appealing.
If you're interested in open space conferences, I warmly recommend attending one. And if you're looking into organizing one for your company, get in touch. I'd be happy to help facilitate it.