Categories

Singular attributes of Entities that help with filtering and characterization.

A Category is a means of denoting a core feature that is key in distinguishing Entities - for now, we have them broken out as follows, but this may change and we will keep this page and the Data updated accordingly.

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Types of Categories

Right now we are using the following Categories:

Government

Government applies to any of the Entities that are governmental in nature

We believe this will generally be somewhat simple, but there are Entities with very close ties to Non-Profits we expect may take some disambiguation.

EXAMPLE: Army Futures Command is a government Organization and has various Projects associated with it).

Academic

We applied Academic to Entities that have a primary tie to universities or other educational institutions.

Although the majority of these are also Non-Profit (at least nominally), the distinction is significant enough to warrant a separate category in our judgment.

EXAMPLE: Stanford offering of a class focused on Hacking for Defense, which is a separate Project Entity with the Non-Profit Category.

Non-Profit

Non-Profit is applied to non-Academic Entities that do not operate for a profit as Commercial counterparts do.

While sometimes challenging to distinguish from Government or Academic efforts (at least, we often find it confusing), this distinction applies to a number of Entities we think are important (such as us!).

EXAMPLE: The Common Mission Project, which runs Hacking for Defense at universities around the country in coordination with the National Security Innovation Network.

Commercial

We use Commercial with Entities whose primary goal is financial gain as measured by stakeholder value or other similar metric.

These are generally wonderful teammates and great folks who care about the mission as much as the rest of us (but it is important to understand how their incentives and structures differ from other Entities).

EXAMPLE: BMNT, a consultancy which originated the Hacking for Defense method and spun-off the Common Mission Project as a separate Non-Profit Entity.