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Can anyone explain what BOF stands for?

Birds of a Feather. They're informal, ad-hoc meetings centered on a specific topic. Like if the topic of "unit testing" (for example) comes up a lot, someone might propose a BOF on unit testing and anyone interested can show up and ask questions, run a demo, etc.

You'll also see them called "open spaces".

PyCon has some great ones although they were a little disappointing this year. A combination of the hotel layout and placement of the openspace proposal (sign up) board was not great.

I agree. The BOFs were often VERY hard to find, plus they were what felt like a 10-minute walk from the hotel lobby. I tried locating a few that I was interested in but didn't have much success.

PyCon 2012 was my first geek conference and left me a little disappointed.

Please post more about why you feel this way. I know that Jesse Noller and some of the other organisers would be interested in feedback from first time attendees.

See http://static.usenix.org/event/lisa11/bofs.html

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