Glossary

Maker Journey

The four-stage scale describing what a learner’s making is for — Explorer, Maker, Innovator, Changemaker. It runs across every subject rather than inside any one of them.

It is a scale of purpose, not of proficiency. A learner is never ranked on it, and the stages are not compared against one another on a competency grid.

Learning journey

Stage

One of the four positions on the Maker Journey. A stage answers the question what is this work for, and entry to each is condition-based rather than scheduled.

Stages are named, never numbered. Numbering them would turn a description of purpose into a ranking of people, which is precisely what this system is built to avoid.

The four purposes

Explorer

The first stage — “What can I do?” Encountering tools, materials, ideas and peers through low-pressure experiences. Open entry: a person walks in.

Explorer work is unassessed by definition — it runs as open, curiosity-led tinkering rather than against a set task. Unassessed is not unguided: facilitators keep it safe, answer questions and give feedback when it is wanted, and none of that counts toward certification. Assessing exploration is how you stop people exploring.

The four purposes Published sources[5]

Maker

The second stage — “Can I make something?” Focused practice that builds dependable capability in a chosen subject, through assessed projects.

The only stage in which levels exist, and the stage from which the completion standard and certification apply.

The four purposes

Innovator

The third stage — “Can I make it better?” Applied inquiry: using capability from one or more subjects to investigate a real problem and test alternatives.

A technically excellent build with no community origin and no outside user leaves its maker an Innovator. That is a complete and respectable place to be, not a failure to progress.

The four purposes

Changemaker

The fourth stage — “Can I make a difference?” Entered by producing a grassroots innovation, not by time served, enthusiasm, or finishing a programme.

The wider social-innovation sector uses this word far more broadly — a changemaker is anyone who takes creative action for the greater good, requiring no innovation and no artefact. Our gate is deliberately narrower, because a definition that admits everyone cannot be counted. When reading our figures, read them against this definition and not the sector’s.

Definitional review → ·The Changemaker gate Published sources[38]

Changemaker Candidate

Someone who has entered the venture pathway on demonstrated intent and commitment, but has not yet produced a grassroots innovation. A candidate becomes a Changemaker by producing one.

Candidates are the denominator and Changemakers the numerator of the conversion rate. A candidate count published as a changemaker count is the single easiest way to overstate this model, and we do not do it.

The metric that matters

Level

Depth within one subject, attached to a programme. A level is three things at once — a descriptor, a volume of notional learning hours, and an assessable artifact — and all three are required.

A level never describes a person. “Robotics Systems — Level 3” is a programme; “a Level 3 person” is not a thing, because any single number describing a whole learner has destroyed information to produce itself.

What a level is

Level count

The number of levels in a subject, derived from the genuine capability thresholds between a beginner and independent practice — never chosen to match another subject or fill a column.

Where no progression has yet been authored for a subject, the entry says so. A number in that cell would imply a placement check, an exit condition and an assessable artifact that have not been written.

Deriving a level count ·What a level actually means

The four growth axes

Depth · Independence · Complexity · Impact — the four ways in which one level is genuinely deeper than the level below it.

They exist so that “harder” means something checkable. A level that has moved along none of them is not a level; it is the same work with a larger number attached.

What a level is

Unit

A block of work inside a single programme — for example “Level 1, Unit 2 of 4”. Units organise delivery; they do not carry a certificate of their own.

Not to be confused with a Starter Unit, which is a physical replicated site.

Programme specification

Programme

The thing a learner enrols in and is certified for: one subject, one level, with published prerequisites, learning outcomes, units and assessed work.

What every programme publishes

Domain

Also written Subject

A coherent area of learning and practice through which someone can build capability. The published list names the domains currently offered or in development; it is not a permanently closed set, and domains may be added, combined or retired.

Learner-facing pages often say subject for the same thing. The word to avoid is faculty or department: domains are what a learner progresses through, not how the organisation is divided.

The domains offered now

Floor

A physical area of the building, its equipment, the capability held there and the people who gather around it — electromechanics, software, media, music. Facilitated on rotation and not owned by one person — a deliberate rule, because capability that belongs to an individual leaves when they do.

Domains and floors are different categories, not competing names: a domain is what you learn; a floor is where you do it and who you do it with. They overlap freely, and several domains have no floor of their own. The sector often calls this a lab. We publish no standing list of floors, because a floor exists while a team sustains it and dissolving one is a legitimate end rather than a failure.

The floors

Maker profile

A learner’s record of depth across subjects — say, robotics at level 4, music at level 1, plus stage milestones — held together rather than averaged.

There is no “overall level”. The profile is the record; a single rank would be a lossy summary of it.

The maker profile

Milestone

A recorded, never-graded checkpoint inside the Innovator and Changemaker stages — a field test completed, a user trial run, a community agreement reached.

Milestones replace levels above the Maker stage, because at that point the useful question stops being “how deep” and becomes “did it work, and for whom”.

Milestones, not levels

Placement check

A programme’s entry assessment: direct evidence that a learner holds the prerequisites, however and wherever those were acquired.

It replaces every proxy for readiness — age, school year, prior enrolment — with a measurement of the thing itself. Prior learning counts whether it came from school, work, the internet, or a relative who repairs things.

Placement ·Placement instead of age

Leaver

Someone who stops before the end of a stage or programme. Leavers and their destinations are recorded as carefully as completers.

Leaving early is a route, not an absence. A programme that only records the people who finished has described its best cases and called it a result.

Leaving and returning

Facilitator

The person running a session or a floor. A function held on rotation rather than a permanent post, and the role the wider field also names — the shift is from lecturer to facilitator, mentor and collaborator.

This is not a ban on teaching. A facilitator teaches, coaches, co-designs and co-learns, often within the same hour. What is refused is the framing of a class at a tuition centre, along with the words lecturer and instructor that carry it.

What a facilitator does

The three facilitator roles

The job splits three ways rather than one: the organiser sets the challenge and its context, the teacher is accountable for the content, and the coach works with the learner on their own work.

The same person often holds all three. Naming them separately is what makes it possible to notice when one of them is not being done.

What a facilitator does Published sources[14]

Mentor

A paired, longer-term relationship attached to a person rather than to a place — the usual delivery form for venture-pathway support.

Taught instruction

Structured, syllabus-following teaching, tuned to the maker model. One of the two delivery modes, and a first-class one rather than a fallback.

Guidance is highest where knowledge is lowest. The strongest published critique of discovery-led teaching is that minimal guidance fails novices, and this mode is the direct answer to it.

Definitional review → ·Two delivery modes Published sources[17]

Open making

Unstructured, self-directed, peer-driven time on the floor. It is not assessed by default — a learner may later submit something made here as programme evidence if it meets the criteria — and it is timetabled deliberately rather than left over.

The two delivery modes run at every stage in shifting ratio. Neither belongs to a particular stage.

Definitional review → ·Two delivery modes Published sources[26]

Guided project work

The Maker-stage frame: a scaffolded brief supplied by the facilitator, with the solution left to the learner. Narrow in method, open in outcome.

The solution space widens as scaffolding decreases, and only in that order — a first workshop is tightly defined, later ones give a bigger space with less support.

How teaching is sequenced Published sources[15]

Project-based learning

Also written PBL

Sustained work on a driving question producing an artifact — the Innovator-stage default, and the only thing the abbreviation PBL means on this site.

Problem-based learning is a distinct tradition with a different history and structure, and it is not part of this model. The two are not interchangeable and the abbreviation is not shared.

Definitional review → ·Published foundations Published sources[10, 11, 16]

Challenge-based learning

Also written CBL

Starting from a real situation rather than a syllabus, and running Engage → Investigate → Act. It spans the Innovator and Changemaker stages; the Changemaker stage adds real stakes to the Act phase.

On the venture pathway it is a thread running through every stage, not one step in a sequence.

Definitional review → ·How teaching is sequenced ·The thread Published sources[12, 13, 14]

Tinkering

Open, playful investigation of materials, led by curiosity rather than a set task. The Explorer-stage default — and guided throughout: the facilitator keeps it safe and helps when asked, without turning it into an exercise.

Definitional review → ·What is fluid, and what is fixed Published sources[5]

Hands-on

The standard adjective for how this education is delivered — hands-on workshop, hands-on learning, hands-on experience.

Hyphenated, lowercase. We do not write practical, which is older organisational language, and we do not write learn by doing.

Open experience

An Explorer-stage entry format giving access to tools, ideas and possible domains. Unassessed, and no prior capability required; places, safeguarding and practical conditions still apply.

Delivery formats

Bootcamp

An intensive cohort format, running anywhere from a few days to six months, most often around three. It has a start, an end, and a funnel.

A bootcamp licenses a claim about a cohort, including how many of them finished. The funnel is the point: reporting only the people who completed describes the survivors.

Workshop

A one-off, typically one day, with a prepared agenda.

A workshop licenses a claim about attendance and nothing more. It is never a training outcome and never a completion.

Session

One meeting inside a programme, bootcamp or school term — the unit that carries a shape: opener, taught content, practical work, reflection.

A session is a unit of delivery, not of achievement. On its own it licenses no claim at all.

Constructionism

Seymour Papert’s learning theory: knowledge is built rather than transmitted, and it is built most readily when the learner is consciously making a public entity — something that can be shown, discussed and argued with.

It is the theory maker education most often names as its foundation, and the one it most often implements only in vocabulary. Papert declined to define the term further on principle, which is why a large literature cites, as its anchor, a chapter that refuses to define its subject.

Definitional review → ·Published foundations Published sources[1, 4]

Experiential learning

Learning through a cycle of concrete experience, reflection, conceptualisation and active experimentation. It is where the requirement for a written reflection at certification comes from.

The step that carries the weight is reflection. Experience without it is an event, and does not transfer to the next problem.

Definitional review → Published sources[7]

Cognitive apprenticeship

Making expert thinking visible: the facilitator models the reasoning aloud, coaches while the learner attempts it, and withdraws support as competence grows.

It is the mechanism underneath “guidance is highest where knowledge is lowest” — the support is designed to be removed, on a schedule set by the learner rather than the timetable.

Definitional review → ·How teaching is sequenced

Maker education

Education organised around making things — the field this system belongs to. Cross-disciplinary by definition, and framed around a mindset rather than a set of machines.

The evidence base is real but uneven: systematic reviews find creativity and engagement well supported, and long-term livelihood outcomes barely studied at all. We publish both halves.

Definitional review → ·Why making belongs in education Published sources[2, 3, 24]

Problem-based learning

A distinct tradition, originating in medical education, in which an ill-structured problem is the starting point and the curriculum follows from it.

Not part of this system, and not what PBL means here. The term is defined on this site only so that the abbreviation cannot be read two ways.

Definitional review → ·Published foundations Published sources[16]

TVET

Technical and vocational education and training — the sector a reader will most likely file this work under, and the closest formal comparator to what happens here.

The comparison is worth making rather than avoiding. Systematic review of TVET interventions in low- and middle-income countries finds effects that are positive but small, and often not sustained — which is exactly why the “Earn” claim here is measured rather than asserted.

Definitional review → ·Generating the missing evidence Published sources[56]

Definition of Done

The completion standard: six evidence states that assessed work must show, in any order — Aim, Options, Made, Evaluated, Shared, Refined.

They are evidence categories, not steps. They must never be drawn as a cycle, a loop or a sequence, and they are not taught as one — a prescribed cycle beginning “identify a problem” is engineering-shaped and fails music, art and much of design.

Definitional review → ·Six evidence states

Aim

Evidence state: what the learner was trying to do, and for whom. It may have been settled at the start or discovered halfway through.

Six evidence states

Options

Evidence state: that more than one way of doing it was considered, and that a choice between them was made for a reason.

Six evidence states

Made

Evidence state: something exists. An artifact, a recording, a performance, a working system.

Six evidence states

Evaluated

Evidence state: it was tested against the aim, by some means the learner can describe — measurement, a listener, a user, a run that failed.

Six evidence states

Shared

Evidence state: it left the bench. Shown, performed, published, handed to someone, or taught to another learner.

Six evidence states

Refined

Evidence state: something changed as a result of the evaluation or the sharing — including a documented decision to change nothing, and why.

Six evidence states

Artifact

The made thing itself — object, recording, software, performance or documented service. The first of the three sources of certificate evidence.

Called the hard result where it needs distinguishing from the capability it evidences.

Certificate evidence

Talk-through

A structured oral explanation of the work at assessment: how it works, why it was built that way, and what was tried and rejected.

Not a viva, an exam or a defence. It exists because it is the cheapest reliable way to tell understanding from a well-followed instruction sheet, and because it does not require a learner to write well in order to demonstrate that they understand.

Certificate evidence

Reflection

A short written or recorded account of the process — the third source of certificate evidence, and the step that makes an experience transferable to the next problem.

Certificate evidence Published sources[7]

Hard result and soft results

The hard result is the artifact. The soft results are the capabilities it evidences — persistence, judgement, collaboration, the ability to debug.

Both are recorded, and they are recorded differently. Soft results are described against published frameworks; they are not scored on an invented scale.

Judging quality

Certificate

What a completed programme produces. It requires the artifact, the talk-through and the reflection — three sources, not one — and it names the programme and level, never a stage.

Certificate evidence

Assessed work

Work to which the Definition of Done applies — from the Maker stage upward, which is exactly where certification applies.

Explorer work is exempt by definition, not by omission.

What is fluid, and what is fixed

MakerSpace by DreamSpace Academy

The community makerspace and digital-education hub this education runs in — one space that moves people from making, to innovation, to enterprise. Written in full on first mention.

It is the permanent foundation of the model, not a stage anyone leaves behind, and it is one programme of DreamSpace Academy rather than a synonym for the organisation.

The MakerSpace model

Makerspace

The generic sector term: a shared physical facility with tools, materials, expertise and a community around them, open to people who could not assemble any of that individually.

It is not an equipment room and not a computer lab. Where nearly all connectivity is already mobile, the missing thing is not a signal — it is a bench, a machine and somebody who knows how to use them.

Definitional review → ·What it is not ·A makerspace is not a computer lab Published sources[29]

Ecosystem

The keyword of the model: the surrounding conditions — tools, examples, expertise, introductions, first customers, peers — that make entrepreneurial and innovative activity possible.

Entrepreneurial outcomes are better explained by these conditions than by any single programme a person completed. That is why the strand is woven through rather than appended, and why the space itself is part of the intervention.

Definitional review → ·Why “ecosystem” is the keyword Published sources[34, 35]

Community of practice

A group whose shared work is how its members learn. Newcomers begin at the edge on real tasks and move inward — which is a description of a functioning makerspace floor.

Definitional review → ·Published foundations Published sources[8, 9]

Multidisciplinary

Several domains under one roof, deliberately. Not a nice-to-have: real problems are not single-subject, people arrive through different doors, and capability transfers sideways between domains.

The canonical definition of maker education is itself cross-disciplinary — a mash-up of the workshop, home economics, art and science. Making that is only engineering has already narrowed who will come.

Why the domains sit together ·Why the music room is next to the electronics bench Published sources[2]

STEAM

Science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics — the frame this organisation uses across its programmes.

The A is load-bearing. Arts, music and media are roughly half of what this organisation actually delivers, so writing STEM would drop the largest strand. We keep STEM only where a partner, an event name or a national policy uses it.

Starter Unit

One replicated makerspace site, specified to open below one million rupees — the smallest configuration that can still deliver the standard.

Always two words, capitalised, and never called a franchise, a branch or a centre. Not to be confused with a Unit inside a programme.

The Starter Unit

Social franchise

A replication model in which independent local operators run the model under a shared standard, support package and identity, with social outcome rather than profit as the return.

Two circulating franchise statistics are not used here — a widely repeated survival comparison between franchises and startups, and any branded “five stages of scale”. Both failed verification.

Definitional review → ·Why a social franchise Published sources[49, 48, 51]

Fidelity

What must stay the same across every site for a certificate to keep its meaning — the completion standard, the stage definitions, the safety rules and the assessment method.

Its counterpart is what is deliberately left local: the domains offered, the language of delivery, the timetable, the partnerships and the problems worked on. Naming both halves is what stops replication becoming either a franchise of empty branding or a set of unrelated spaces sharing a logo.

What is fixed, and what is local

Shared project bank

The pooled library of tested projects, briefs, curricula and assessment materials that every site draws from and contributes back to.

It is the main thing a new site gets that it could not build alone, and the main reason the network is worth more than the sum of its sites.

The shared project bank

Learn · Make · Solve · Earn

Also written The four verbs

The four things the MakerSpace offers a person. They run as threads inside every stage; they are not a sequence and they are not the four stages under another name.

Three of them describe things maker education is well evidenced to do. The fourth, Earn, is the reason there is a measurement apparatus at all.

The four words that carry it

Earn

Income and work — read across three tiers of very different evidential strength. Tier 1: small income, a maker selling what they made. Tier 2: a sustained livelihood, by venture or by wage. Tier 3: work created for others, when a venture employs, contracts or buys locally.

The three are reported separately rather than as a single promise. Tier 1 is near-term and not in dispute; tier 2 is a hypothesis we measure rather than assert; tier 3 is present in the literature and unmeasured here, so it may be taught as an aim and never reported as a result. Earn is never read as self-employment only — a participant who takes a good job is evidence for the model.

What “Earn” actually claims

The enterprise strand

Research and development, entrepreneurship, and business and financial literacy, woven through every domain and every stage rather than appended as a final module.

In one line: make it work, make it matter, make it last. The reason for weaving is that the useful part of entrepreneurship — mentors, introductions, a first buyer, follow-on support — is a networked support system and cannot be delivered in a closing module.

Innovation & enterprise

Research & development

Also written R&D

The first area of the strand — make it work. Systematic inquiry applied to something real: prototype, test, document, repeat.

The three areas

Entrepreneurship

The second area of the strand — make it matter. Turning a working solution into something someone wants: opportunity discovery, value proposition, a minimum viable product, and a pitch.

Described against a published competence framework rather than an invented one, so that what is taught can be compared with what others teach.

Definitional review → ·The three areas Published sources[36]

Business & financial literacy

The third area of the strand — make it last. Costing, pricing, bookkeeping, marketing and operations.

Kept distinct from entrepreneurship rather than collapsed into “business”. They fail in different ways: a venture can be wanted and still not survive its own arithmetic.

The three areas

The sell loop

Make something, price it, sell it to a stranger, and work out afterwards what the result told you. The cheapest way to put a maker in front of a real user.

This is pedagogy, not a revenue line. The learner keeps the money; the organisation earns nothing from it and budgets nothing from it. The moment a learner’s sales count toward organisational income, the organisation acquires an interest in what children make, and the teaching is finished.

The sell loop ·Teaching enterprise by selling something

Innovation

A solution to a real problem. It may be technical, academic, personal or commercial, and it belongs to the Innovator stage.

Not every innovation is a grassroots innovation, and the difference is the whole gate.

Definitional review → ·The innovation ladder

Grassroots innovation

An innovation rooted in a real community challenge, passing three tests, all of them: the problem came from the community; a user outside the space has tested it; and someone depends on the outcome.

It may be a product, a service or an initiative — the form is not what makes it grassroots. The first test asks where the problem came from, not who introduced it: a mentor or facilitator naming a real community problem passes, and that is the normal route here. What fails is a problem set for the occasion — a competition brief, a funder’s theme, a lab exercise, or the maker’s own curiosity. The term is borrowed from an established literature describing innovation driven by social need rather than profit, including a South Asian strand documenting empathetic innovators who did not personally suffer the problem they solved: a learner need not have lived the problem, but must have taken it from someone who did.

Definitional review → ·The Changemaker gate ·What counts as a solved local problem Published sources[46, 47]

The venture pathway

Also written The DreamSpace Lifecycle

The route from a person with intent to a venture that stands on its own: three stages, one thread and four support modes.

Five names are carried, and two of them are not stages: challenge-based learning is the thread that runs through all of them, and domain expertise is one of the support modes. It is never written as “the five stages”.

Venture pathway

Changemaker Discovery

Stage one of the venture pathway: entry. Two routes in — discovered, where field workers find someone already doing something; or co-created, where a learner arrives through the Maker Journey.

Two ways in

Impact-Venture Building

Stage three of the venture pathway: turning a grassroots innovation into something that can keep running — a venture, a service, or a practice that a community sustains.

Venture building

The four support modes

What is offered at and after the gate: co-creation, connections and brokerage, domain expertise, and funding. Available in any combination and any order.

They are explicitly not a sequence. No participant on record has used them as one, and presenting them as steps would misdescribe what actually happens.

Four support modes

Brokerage

Connecting a local problem to a non-local resource, and the resource back to the problem — introductions to funders, specialists, networks and international opportunities.

This is the mode most often named as this organisation’s differentiator and the least evidenced of them. It is also committed to running both ways: one-way brokerage does not qualify.

Brokerage, made countable

Impact venture

A venture that came out of a real community challenge, has a credible path to paying for itself by trading, and cannot yet do so without support. All three clauses are required.

Without the first it is an ordinary startup; without the second it is a programme and should be funded and named as one; without the third it has graduated. There is no standard-setting definition of this term in the sector, so ours is stated wherever it is relied on.

Definitional review → ·Venture building

Graduation

Also written Self-sustaining venture

The point at which a venture pays for itself by trading and no longer needs support. The event has a name; the graduated thing is simply a self-sustaining venture, or a business.

The label “impact venture” is a stage, and it expires. The measure that matters is graduations, not the count of ventures currently supported — that number rises when more work is taken on and looks best when nothing is finishing.

The metric that matters

Startup

The general term for any new venture seeking a viable model, regardless of legal form — for-profit, non-profit, cooperative or collective.

It overlaps with impact venture and does not contain it: most startup definitions require growth, which the impact-venture definition deliberately does not. A venture reaching a sustainable local livelihood is a success here.

Definitional review → Published sources[37]

Entrepreneur

The person who starts and runs a venture. Entrepreneurs are what an ecosystem is made of, and support is not conditional on having come through our own programmes.

Not a synonym for Changemaker, which is a stage on the Maker Journey with an evidence gate attached.

Definitional review →

Incubation

Structured support for an early venture — space, mentoring, introductions, and sometimes capital — for a defined period with a defined end.

Support is form-agnostic. The test is whether the thing strengthens the ecosystem, not whether it is a company, whether it is for-profit, or whether it came through us.

Organisational lifecycle

The life stages of an organisation itself — idea, start-up, growth, maturity, and what follows. A descriptive frame used to place an organisation, not a pathway anyone is put through.

Lowercase, and never “the Lifecycle”. That name belongs to the venture pathway, which is a designed route a person enters, has no decline stage, and finishes at success. The two are structurally different things that share a word.

Definitional review → ·Venture pathway

DreamSpace Academy

The organisation this reference belongs to: a non-profit social enterprise working on local socio-economic challenges, founded on 30 September 2018 in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka.

The organisation is not itself a makerspace. The MakerSpace is one of the things it runs.

The three pillars

Education · Innovation · Entrepreneurship — the three domains everything the organisation runs sits under. This site covers the first and the third in full, and the second where the two meet.

The four verbs are not the pillars. Research is not a fourth pillar either: it is the evidence discipline underneath all three.

Social enterprise

What this organisation calls itself — a non-profit social enterprise, meaning it trades and reinvests rather than distributing a surplus.

Not the term for a venture produced by the model; that is an impact venture. Using “social enterprise” for a learner’s venture names the wrong organisation.

Definitional review →

Capability

Everything a person needs to solve a problem themselves and to keep solving the next one — skill, tools, a network, capital, permission to act, a problem worth solving, and standing enough to be heard. The whole bundle, not the first item.

The test that gives the word meaning: does it persist when we leave? This is deliberately not “capacity building”, whose usual answer to that question is no, and deliberately not “skills” — a large majority of Sri Lanka’s unemployed are already computer literate, so skill is not the scarce input.

The gap it answers Published sources[58]

Local

A relation, not a location: local to wherever this work is being done. Reading it as one fixed place makes the purpose untrue the moment the model crosses a boundary.

Community

Who a piece of work is rooted in, and who bears its outcome. Scoped per project rather than defined once, and made operational by the first and third grassroots-innovation tests.

Not the same as the ecosystem. The ecosystem co-creates — the organisation, learners, partners, funders, visitors. The community owns. Collapsing the two makes it unclear whose problem was being solved.

Underserved

Inadequate or absent provision of a named service, relative to need. Incomplete until two blanks are filled in: underserved in what, relative to whom — so every project states its axis.

Not a synonym for marginalised, vulnerable or disadvantaged, which describe exclusion, exposure and deficit respectively and license different claims. The test is access: poor results despite provision do not qualify a community on that axis.

Definitional review →

Co-creation

The method: building with a community rather than for it, from problem definition through to who owns the result. It is also one of the four support modes.

Not a synonym for consultation or collaboration. The measurable version is the question the community co-creation instrument asks — who defined the challenge, who made the decisions, and who owns the outcome.

Definitional review → ·The eight instruments

The co-verbs

Co-learn, co-innovate, co-produce — what happens between people in the ecosystem. An open set, not a closed taxonomy.

They describe the ecosystem; the four verbs describe one learner’s journey. Different subjects, and no correspondence should be drawn between them.

A solved local problem

The countable unit behind the goal of one hundred by 2050: a grassroots innovation for which all three tests hold. Rung four of the innovation ladder, and nothing below it.

A unit launched, a programme delivered, a learner trained or a prototype built is not a solved local problem. The definition is strict on purpose — it makes the goal harder, and it makes the count mean something.

What counts as a solved local problem

The Sustainable Development Goals

Also written SDGs

The global goals adopted in 2015. Results are mapped to them so that outcomes can be read against a shared frame.

A mapping states which goal a result relates to. It is never a claim to have advanced that goal nationally or globally.

Published sources[61]

The results hierarchy

Six levels that are never interchangeable: inputs, activities, outputs, short-term outcomes, medium-term outcomes, long-term impacts.

A workshop delivered is not a skill gained; a skill gained is not a job; a prototype is not a solved problem. Each level is reported on its own line, which is what keeps the six readable as a chain rather than as one number.

The results hierarchy

The innovation ladder

Four rungs that are routinely reported as one: 1 a learner project · 2 a functioning prototype · 3 tested by an external user · 4 a grassroots innovation.

The drop-off between rungs is measured, because the drop-off is where the information is. Only rung four counts toward the goal.

The innovation ladder

Reach

How many people an activity touched. An output, not an outcome, and reported as such.

Attendances are not unique people, which is why a unique participant register exists. A reach figure presented as impact is the defect the results hierarchy exists to prevent.

Baseline and endline

Capability measured at the start and the end of a programme, tied to that programme’s own curriculum.

Measure the content, or do not claim it. Until this instrument exists for a given programme, no content-gain claim can be made about it.

The eight instruments

Longitudinal follow-up

Contact at 3, 6, 12, 24 and 36 months after leaving, against a livelihood baseline taken at intake. It is what makes the “Earn” question answerable at all.

Short-term employment gains from skills programmes have been found not to persist at 12–15 months in randomised evaluation. A follow-up window that closes before that point cannot detect the thing that matters.

When measurement happens Published sources[55, 56]

Hypothesis

A claim this model is testing rather than asserting — labelled as such wherever it appears, most importantly the second tier of “Earn”.

The convention is deliberate: a hypothesis stated as a finding is the failure mode that makes an entire evidence base unreadable.

The rules we report under

Self-reported

A figure supplied by the person or organisation it describes. Recorded and labelled, never presented as a verified count.

Limitation

What a result cannot show — sample, method, timing, attribution. Published alongside the result, not in a footnote after it.

The rules we report under