Click here to see the schedule of the event.
Click here to see wiki documentation of the sessions.

The Open Business lab is a chance to meet, talk, network and see who is doing what in this relatively small community that is set to grow exponentially in the near future.

Some of the world's foremost open business people will gather in one room for three days to put together a checklist on open business. Existing and potential open business ideas will be looked at, critiqued, reworked - in open business even consulting is open. Bring your open business idea and the top minds in the community will be able to have a look at it and give you a few pointers.

The goals of the Open Business lab are:

• To investigate what projects and initiatives stakeholders are involved in or have conceptualised, to enable participants to gain an understanding of the context and landscape of open business
• To debate, discuss, experiment and analyse the feasibility of new open business ideas.
• Contextualise and describe what CC+ is and the business possibilities born out of practical implementation

The first session will involve a short introduction of the participants and their businesses or business ideas. A discussion about the CC+ protocol will take place, so that this open licensing tool for business is functionally understood by all and it's advantages and disadvantages can be fed into discussions throughout the lab.

Session 2 will feature the Open Business Think Tank which will seek to put together a draft checklist on what 'open business' means and what characteristics a business needs to have for it to be considered an 'open business'. This checklist will become the working document for the rest of the lab. Session 4 has also been set aside where participants can then change and challenge this working document in preparation for the report-back session at the end of the summit.

During Session 3 the group will be splitting up into two. A group will join the DIY Video lab to discuss some of the progressive business models that have cropped up in video. Many of the participants in the Open Business lab run open businesses that are video-based so this session promises to deliver some ground breaking outcomes. The other group will stay in the Open Business venue where a discussion around Collecting Societies will take place entitled "Mars Landing - Collecting Societies Opened." Moderated by Paul Keller, this session will look at some of the great leaps that the commons has made in the tussle with collecting societies and then a discussion will be held on the way forward. Outputs from these discussions will all be fed back into the Open Business working document.

Session 5 will provide the opportunity for open business entrepreneurs to throw their business ideas around in an open consultation session, where we take the concept of openness into consulting. This will be the session where we see whether we think that the market will allow us to stick to the characteristics of open business that we will have noted in the working document by this point. It will also allow us to see just how far our openness reaches in terms of opening our business models to each other.

Session 6 will be a process of honing the working document into a checklist and putting together feedback to the iSummit community in the final session.

Whether you are an existing open entrepreneur, someone who wants to become an open entrepreneur, an entrepreneur who wants to know more about open business or just a member of the public who would like to find out if there is a different mode in which business can function; the Open Business lab is going to be a place where new ground is broken in the growth of the commons.

Pic by tom-b on flickr.com, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0