Project or workspace?

In summary: a project is the initiative; a workspace is where work is produced.

They are peers rather than a hierarchy. Neither contains the other. A project may generate any number of workspaces over its life, including none, and a workspace may exist without a project.

Selecting between them

	Project	Workspace
Owned by	One organisation	No owning organisation
Membership	The organisation’s team and stakeholders	Partners across organisations, and guests
Typical duration	Months to years	Weeks to months
Structured around	Milestones and phases	Deliverables and contributions
Purpose	Planning and tracking	Producing work collaboratively
Ends when	Goals are met, funding ends, or it is closed	The output is compiled and delivered

Work describing what an organisation is trying to achieve is a project. Work produced with members of other organisations is a workspace.

A project is programme structure

A project is not a Gantt chart, an issue tracker, or a grant-management system. This is the most common source of mismatched expectations.

There are deliberately no sub-tasks, no assignments and no Kanban board. Work at the level of “write section 3” has no location here by design.

The distinction the platform draws:

A task tracker asks	A project asks
Was the task completed?	Did the phase deliver its output?
Tracks activities	Tracks commitments

Milestones and deliverables

	Milestone (project)	Deliverable (workspace)
What it is	A strategic output, a phase	A tactical output
For example	“Youth training curriculum”	“Module 3: Conflict Resolution”
Where it comes from	The workspaces you linked	Contributions from partners

The two are the same concept at different levels. A milestone is delivered through a workspace rather than assembled directly, whereas a deliverable is assembled from partner contributions.

Example

A funded programme illustrates the relationship:

• The project runs for three years and holds the milestones reported to the funder.
• Milestone one, “develop the curriculum”, generates a workspace in which three organisations compile it. That workspace is archived once the curriculum is complete.
• Milestone two, “pilot in five countries”, generates a separate workspace with different partners.
• Milestone three, “publish the final report”, is internal and requires no workspace.

The project outlives each of them.

Two constraints

Projects are owned by an organisation, never by an individual. Funding is disbursed to organisations, so this is a fixed constraint. Members without an organisation can still use matching, connections and opportunities, and join or create an organisation when they are ready to run an initiative.

Organisation membership does not confer project membership. Project members are added explicitly, and only project members can view the project. An organisation of forty members should not have all forty within every initiative.

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Wiki spaces are a third construct, and they scope in the opposite direction to workspaces. See Workspaces and spaces.