I have been based in Atlanta for the last ten years. I attended one of my first Microsoft events about 5 years ago in Atlanta, and started attending more of the Microsoft office events in Atlanta this year.
It was in July of this year, that Alan Stevens, and Chris Rauber, did a presentation on Inversion of Control frameworks. Which is one of the best I have attended here in Atlanta. During the talk, Alan Stevens mentioned both the Codestock and Devlink conferences during August in Tenessee. The cost of these conferences was at a pricepoint I could afford, and get my company to foot the bill. (for 2008 - Codestock was $25 and Devlinks - where I registered later, was $75). With travel of a meal, and hotel, this was so much less than a PDC conference, this was a great opportunity.
Alan Stevens, mentioned he was going to be working the "OpenSpaces" at both conferences. My prior conference experiences had always been, pick the best presentations and go to those first as that is what these conferences are for.
So, I went to Codestock in Knoxvile TN, and I attended the standard sessions, as my thoughts were that this is what a conference was for. That was my previous Conference experience.
I was curious about the openspace at CodeStock because of Alan Stevens being in charge of this. During lunch at CodeStock, I walked by the openspaces room, the door was always open during the event, and I stopped in to listen to the discussion. I was immediatlely impressed with the level of conversation. Here it seemed were some of the main people of the developer user groups from Birmingham, Philadelphia, St Louis, North Carolina, Nashville,Atlanta, Lansing Michigan, Jacksonville FL and others discussing the issues of how to run the sessions in their regions with regard to the Alt.Net influences (which I have to admit I am still learning what that is all about). It was a great discussion that had everyone totally engaged. I liked what I was hearing. There is a 30 min video posted (in multiple formats) from a discussion on ORM's that comes from Codestock openspace.
It was the Codestock OpenSpaces discussion at lunch that opened my mind, that here were some of the best and brightest developer types I had interacted with, some of whom were presenting, and we were in a direct discussion, where I could ask real questions. The value that room had at lunch, where multiple speakers were engaged in the converation was incredible. That was what created my double take for OpenSessions - there are developers who do not do presentations but had a significant contributions to the developer community. That got my attention. Here were the people who want to continually improve their skills.
For my experience at Devlinks, I misunderstood a schedule/room change for the first session after the keynote - and I needed to select a different session. The curiosity about the open spaces brought me to the "Opening Circle" where the OpenSpaces were about to start. This "Opening Circle" session was to have people propose topics they wanted to talk about. It was the self directed conference within a conference where real questions and people who might be passionate about a topic - were asking for a time to discuss an idea.
For me, and it is entirely a personal position, OpenSpaces had more of the developer types that I NEED to intereract with, who have real world experiences and knowledge. That brought me to undertand that I can gain more from connecting personally, and directly with other developers, who do real work, daily, in the OpenSpaces, than I can in listening to a standard session. I was not being talked at, but interacting with other developers in a very real and personal way.
Both Conferences setup twitter accounts and conference participants could follow other participants via twitter. That enables the possibility of maintaining a connection to these other developers over a much longer period of time than the conference alone - twitter is an enabler of a better network of developers to reach out to. That has changed my earlier skeptical impression of twitter.
Both of these conferences were good, and if they do not price future events too high, I can probably attend them again in the future. I certainly found these both to be very enriching in terms of professional knowledge and connections.