I opened one of my daily Gamasutra digest emails yesterday while catching up from not having read a week’s worth of them at the GDC, when I was suddenly intrigued by the ad at the top. GDC Canada? I’ve never heard of such a thing, but it piqued my interest so I followed the link: http://www.gdc-canada.com/.
Wow! That’s pretty cool! When I visit websites, I almost always ignore the top and sides because most websites reserve those spaces for ads, and I HATE ads (unless they are making me money in my games). But now I see that there’s a whole bunch of GDC events that happen all around the year. There’s five in all – the main GDC, GDC Austin, GDC Canada, GDC Europe, and even GDC China! I knew about the first two, but the last three are new to me. It looks like they all have volunteer opportunities as well!
As I mentioned in previous posts, I have an absolute blast when I volunteer at the GDC in San Fran every year. I also serve as the volunteer coordinator for SIEGE Con in Atlanta. If these other conferences are even one tenth of the fun of GDC, I would have a blast AND get even more networking opportunities. Plus, I’ve always wanted to go to Europe. Can we say “business trip?” 
If any of you readers out there have attended or volunteered for any of these additional conferences, please post a comment and tell us about it. These seem like fantastic opportunities, especially for those students in Europe and Asia (and maybe even Canada) who can’t afford a plane ticket to the US for the main GDC event.