This past weekend I had the privilege to attend devLink. devLink is a community based conference in Murfreesboro, TN. I met some wonderful and brilliant people and lit a spark of motivation for my career and community involvement. The conference had two parallel types of sessions. First, the standard "eyes forward" presentation style sessions were loaded with people desiring some instruction or how-to knowledge on a particular technology or practice. Additionally, a second type of session was held during each time slot: Open spaces. Subsequent to the conference, I did some research on open space conferences and learned that none are the same and all should be agile to adopt to the community which is facilitating the discussion. While new to me, apparently the open spaces have been around for a few years. I wish I had known about them earlier. Who knows where I'd be right now.
After the opening keynote, an opening circle was held to organize the open space sessions. This involved members of the community identifying topics they wanted to talk about. The topics ranged from "how to motivate the other 80%" to "Comments are Evil". From there, each topic was put on a grid to identify time and geography.
After some administrative moving around of topics and condensing similar topics, we went to our first session. If you had chosen to attend an open space session you obviously were not locked into that track. Many people mixed up the schedule and attended both the "eyes forward" and open space styles of sessions. Personally I stuck mostly to open spaces. I found the discussions to be passionate, informative, challenging, invigorating, and thought provoking. I had several of my ideas challenged and that in turn invokes creativity and additional thought. From time to time, it is productive to take part in these types of exercises.
The result of devLink for me was to establish several new goals to better myself as a developer and community member.
- Contribute to an Open Source Project
- Present at a community conference (KY Day of .Net)
- Attend 6 community conferences in the next year (My wife probably wouldn't approve of more)
- Motivate junior developers at my company to attend community events
- Contribute to a regional web site wiki that represents the notes taken during the open space sessions.
Those are some tough goals to put on myself but I think they are attainable. Now I just have to find the work/community participation balance at some point.