I am attending the ALT.NET open spaces conferences this weekend.  The opening was last night and was my introduction to the whole open spaces concept (see the video of the opening at Jeffery Palermo's web site).  So many of the bloggers that I follow are attending.  It was great to meet them. 

Open spaces, for those who do not know, allows anyone to propose (and lead) a topic.  So they take a sticky and write down the topic and their name (and tell everyone about their topic) and then stick it in an open time slot on the board.  Then some of the topics are combined moved, around all based on interaction of the contributors.  There were more topics than spaces.  Everyone then put their initials on the topics they where interested in.  Any topics that did not have very many votes were removed by the contributor (or if the contributor changed their mind), and the agenda for the conference is made.

This was followed by a fish bowl about needing to know multiple programming languages.  A fishbowl is like a reverse musical chairs.  There are more chairs than people.  There must always be one open chair, so if someone sits in the open chair, one of the other people (usually the one that has been sitting the longest) leaves. Many points of view were expressed without getting nasty.  As the fish bowl progressed chairs were taking away until only one empty chair was left.

Afterward, we went for dinner/drinks and basically took over half of a restaurant in Redmond.  Basically, it was quite fun and interesting.