Welcome to The Plenary's Plan.

This site contains all of the essential details relevant to the strategy, operations, and vision of The Plenary. It's designed to be easier to browse and keep updated than your typical never ending business plan PDF, because making information more usable is kind of our thing.

Our Mission

The Plenary makes society’s collective knowledge¹ on current issues² accessible to everyone³.

Public education is essential to ensure that our society and its members thrive.

National Public Radio offers its audibly. Public Broadcasting System offers it visually. But research suggests that we learn best through doing and experiencing.

The Plenary is building a platform and model for public education on critical current and personal issues, focused on the way we learn best.

¹ COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE

We incorporate multiple ways of knowing to construct society’s best emergent understanding of a given topic. That means respecting and communicating insights from across sciences, scholarships, and traditional knowledges. We also recognize that the best information changes as our methods and foundations improve, so we also include the skills and mindsets that promote ongoing updating as evidence evolves.

² CURRENT ISSUES

General science communication, museum education, and other informal learning devices are all powerful tools for adults to continue their education outside of school. We believe the gap is in topical and digestible resources that provide an interdisciplinary, nuanced account of current knowledge on pressing, current and personal issues, such as bias, sustainability, mental health, and economics.

³ ACCESSIBLE TO EVERYONE

Movements like Open Access and many internet outlets have made incredible strides towards financially accessible information (i.e. that everyone can afford). Outreach initiatives like Nerd Nites, The Conversation, and Ted Talks also do important work making information technically accessible (i.e. that non-experts can understand). We work to also ensure our efforts are psychologically accessible, which we define as feeling as if the event or resource was designed with you in mind. This means evaluating the human aspect of design: is representation of people of all backgrounds and abilities present in both the design and content? Does it break stereotypes about what science is and who it’s for? Does it start a meaningful conversation rather than assume the public has a deficit that needs to be filled? We believe that engaging learning opportunities that are financially, technically and psychologically accessible to everyone is key to individual and societal success.