Next week, the Open Source Developers’ Conference 2011 is on, this time hosted in Canberra. OSDC is run by developers, for developers, and of particular interest is the low price of $300 for the full three-day conference, also including morning/afernoon teas, lunches, and the conference dinner and Old Parliament House. OSDC shows that it’s entirely possible to run a conference with good speakers, good content, happy attendees, and lots of atmosphere, at a decent price.

This year OSDC has mini conferences and tutorials before the main event, and on Tuesday afternoon I’ll be hosting an Upstarta workshop. So that’s Tuesday 15 November, 1:30pm in the Manning Clark Center at the Australian National University. Given the background of the main conference, I should reiterate here that Upstarta is not limited to Open Source business or even software development. The approach is quite independent from that – so regardless of the target market for your idea or businesses, if you’re in Canberra next week this workshop could be of interest to you! It’s possible to get a miniconf-only ticket for $50, and the Upstarta Workshop is just $20 extra on top of that or the main conference ticket.

First I will run you through the basics of the Upstarta philosophy, so we’re all on the same wavelength. Then we’ll introduce a number of practical tools to assess disruptive viability of an idea (product or service), work out best marketing positioning to not be hindered by competition, and other applications of the Upstarta principles. We’ll see why various known products succeeded or failed, and discuss (case studies).

In the second part of the workshop, we’ll put your new skills to use on both known concepts as well as any new ideas the participants bring along. Please bring ideas in abundance, and write them down beforehand so that you can tell what it’s about within 10-20 seconds. We’ll specifically filter for disruptive ideas (or tweak an idea to make it disruptive) as it enables cheap market entry, pick a few, and work on them in smaller groups. We then recombine to discuss what each group has come up with!

Exchanging ideas and insights, and asking questions, even with people some might consider to be direct competitors, is more valuable than risky. If your idea is dependent on secrecy, it’s probably not that viable.

I’ll also do an Upstarta-related talk in the OSIA (Open Source Industry Australia) miniconf, Monday afternoon.