The first gathering in person from the group of volunteer "builders" who were each organizing local Open Master's communities around the world and had worked together for more than a year virtually.

Axle Brown launching into an 18-month self-designed sabbatical in Southeast Asia, exploring the intersection of User-Experience Design (UX Design) and Buddhism.

In 2012, the DC Open Master's community hosted a series of "member spotlights" online to share more about what we were doing and to provide a natural check-in points on our journies. In this video, Alex Simon discusses chairs.

In 2013, six participants took over the family house of one members of the Open Master’s Netherlands group with a simple mission: focus on just one skill for one week. On day one they changed each other's Facebook passwords and promised to give them back to each other at the end of the week.

In 2013, after the Open Master's group in the DC had been launched for a little bit less than six month, a second group decided to form in the Netherlands, catalyzed by Marien Baerveldt, Saar Francken, Sydney Brouwer, Tijmen Rümke, and Tim Woensdregt. They organized a work-trade with a coworking space in Utrecht, The Netherlands to have a free room one day a week to use as their primary study space as a group in exchange for offering some learning events to the coworking community.

The first interaction most members of the first Open Master's group had in DC was a 4-hour "studio" for helping each other workshop our learning goals together. Each person got to be the center of the group's attention, one-at-a-time, for 30 minutes, while we worked refining our learning plans and focus.

When he began, Alan Webb published an Open Master's plan to help him organize a two year plan worth of things he wanted to learn. He chose four themes to organize his plan: The Art of Making Things Happen, The Art of Communicating Big Ideas, The Art of Hosting, and The Art of Being.