Jay Kimble

If you were doing something of the sort where would you plan on hosting it? I guess that is more along the lines of the problem, where do you seat 25 - 500 people. I wonder how much it would cost to rent out one of the conference rooms at a hotel? I'm sure if you got enough people to stay at the same place you could get a group rate on the rooms, plus maybe the conference room too.

Good idea; sign me up!  There's quite a few CodeBetterers in Virginia, by the way, if that's a valid secondary location . . .

That would be awesome, but where is your "neck of the woods"?

I'd be interested in hearing more. Sounds like a good idea, but finding the time is always the issue for me.

Aren't "code camp" events kind of like free conferences? They seem to be getting a fair bit of traction in the U.S. - some of my co-workers have even organized on here in Australia www.codecampoz.com

I had some of the same thought except I thought "Why do we need to physically get together anyway? Why can't we do it all on blogs/IRC/IM?"

www.lazycoder.com/.../how-about-a-virtual-developers-conference

www.lazycoder.com/.../devblogcon

Now, this idea is kind of whacked out. I can't think of any conventions of this nature that have been totally online. Usually, there is still some kind of physical meeting that is simulcast over the internet or something. But having a conference that is completely blogged does lower the total cost to mainly time and effort.

BTW, you guys apparently don't have trackbacks set up here and the RSS feed is always republished as new. At least every post on it shows up as new in Bloglines.

You could always start by putting on something similar to what I'm doing with the DayOf.NET events (www.dayof.net). It's completely free and driven by the community. It's been very well attended. And if you want, you could maybe even use the DayOf.NET brand. Contact me through email from my site if you're interesed.

"My neck of the woods" would be Florida (Dunedin aka Clearwater).  Ya got beach, ya got lot's of touristy things, ya got good weather.  BUT, you want to do this all before or after hurricane season... hurricanes sort of screw things up...

Sounds like Code Camp - a free conference run on the weekends. Brendan will be attending the one near us.

http://www.msdncodecamp.com/

Sounds like Code Camp to me too! Additional info  at the Code Camp Wiki:

www.bostondotnet.org/codecamp

Here's an example of a cheap conference that was held here in des moines:

http://www.heartlanddc.com/

we had approximately 200 seats available, and we sold out well before the event took place.

as far as i know, we are planning to do another one later this year. Cost for admission was $18, and we had two tracks with 4 speakers each. Lunch was also included.

I just attended another free event, SQL Summit in Minneapolis, and i have to say that the HDC was much better than the SQL Summit. HDC was planned by 4+ user groups, and was sponsored by various companies, microsoft included.

I agree with the thought that the events MS puts on are outrageously priced, and would much rather go to smaller events like this so i can save my $$ to purchase MSDN Team Suite...