<aside> 📌 We're interested in projects, and programs are the contexts we put in place to develop projects. This document aims to briefly describe projects and programs and highlight the ingredients essential (in our experience) for a successful program.

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What are projects?

"Project" is a catch-all word which doesn't mean much to most people. For us, it's a container for some authentic unit of work. Anything which:

• [ ] Has an authentic purpose and audience
• [ ] And can succeed or fail in that purpose and/or for that audience
• [ ] And has a beginning and end

…can be a project.

It is because "project" is both so versatile and implies real, concrete work that we choose to focus on them. This orientation toward authentic work and output is the inverse of traditional education's focus on processes (like teaching) and inputs (like reading a textbook). These processes are not wrong or bad or value-less, we believe they are simply incomplete, and rarely lead to true understanding.

Elsewhere, we've written about what makes a project great. But what even goes into the effective design and facilitation of a project?

Projects' diversity and divergence means there's no one, universal answer to this question. Some projects require tools to which people need introduction. Others require domain knowledge to even brainstorm a project idea. Still others involve group or collaborative elements requiring coordination.

What goes into a program?

We call the context in which these decisions are made and supports offered a "program", meaning program is simply our term for any facilitated experience where people do projects. We design and run two kinds of programs:

• "Collaborations" in which some people (perhaps including the facilitator) in the program have designed a larger context or project which participants contribute to.
• "Divergent programs" in which participants design and develop their own projects, united by a theme or focus of the program.

Recognizing the contingent quality of project and program development, this document aims to outline the essential questions to which every project and program must have an answer, offering examples of some of the patterns we've found in good answers to these questions.

What is the program about?

What, intellectually and creatively, is at the core of the program? This could be a big idea, a question, problem, theme, community: something real, which will frame and contextualize people's projects.

<aside> 💡 e.g. "Signs of Life" is a program in which people explore what it means for something to be alive through a mixture of (1) building things which are alive in one way or another, ranging from robots which respond to feedback to software implementing some sort of evolutionary process; (2) reading and writing stories working in that theme (think Frankenstein); and (3) debating issues affected by this question (like the legality of abortion).

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What defines success for the program?