"Open Space Technology is one way to enable all kinds of people, in any kind of organization, to create inspired meetings and events." -- http://www.openspaceworld.org/english/openspace.html
OpenSpaceTechnology (OST) belongs to a class of meetings much valued in the AgileSoftwareDevelopment movement, that of ProblemSolvingMeetings.
While not specifically designed for the Software Development domain, it has been successfully used in various Agile Software Development conferences around the world, ex:
See: OpenSpaceWiki
To find out more about OpenSpace, feel free to look around LisaHeft 's site at
for general looking around, to read different papers on the method and to see photos of Open Space events.