Commons for Everyone
Commons for Everyone
Universal frameworks for the fundamentals—usable by any human, at any time.
Unleashing Capacity
Common to every human, common to every moment, is the decision.
Decisions cluster into projects. Projects require relationships. Relationships form teams. These elements are so constant we might forget they can be taught.
Underneath every subject we teach is the person making the decision to pay attention, to persist, to work with others—and underneath that is someone who should be asking, why do I care? Why is this important?
What if we taught the universal capacities to care, think, and act? How we find what matters. How we do projects, how we relate, how we work as a team. How we become authors of our own lives.
That's what Commons is for, and why it’s for everyone.
The Framework in Brief
Every moment contains a decision.
Every decision follows the same structure: something registers as mattering (Care), you make sense of it (Think), you respond (Act).
Most of this happens automatically—which isn't a problem until your automatic patterns no longer serve you, or are being hi-jacked by an algorithm.
The goal isn't constant consciousness—it's knowing when a decision deserves more attention than it's getting.
Simply put: Autopilot to Authorship.
What Commons Provides
steamHouse Commons is a curriculum of frameworks and strategies that wraps around any team or project-based activity.
It's not a replacement for what young people are already doing—competitions, performances, projects, seasons. It's an overlay that makes those activities build the skill AND the person.
Two components work together:
Core Curriculum — the universal fundamentals: how decisions work, how teams form, how to think about thinking
Team Curriculum — 12 lessons on team dynamics, plus bootstrap guides for specific activities (robotics, theater, sports, and more)
Together, they turn activities into growth—lessons that outlive the season, the performance, the project.
Try the Tools
The frameworks aren't just ideas on paper. We've built interactive tools that let you experience them directly — assess your own thinking patterns, explore global perspectives, stress-test your decisions, and map your development.
Eleven self-contained tools, organized in three groups:
Know Your World — Where do you actually stand among 8 billion people? How accurate are your assumptions about the world? Meet a random person from anywhere on Earth.
Know Your Mind — What are your cognitive blind spots? Where are your strengths across 58 development markers? What do you actually value — and how does that compare to what you spend?
Make Better Decisions — Structure a decision from the ground up. Audit it for bias. Get an AI-guided conversation that adapts to your situation.
All tools are free, require no login, and collect no data. They work on any device, in any browser. Use them on your own or bring them to your team.
[Explore the Tool Suite →]
Start With Yourself
These frameworks aren't just for young people. They're descriptions of how every human works — and how every human can work better.
Whether you're a mentor, a parent, a teacher, or just someone trying to think more clearly about your own life — the same architecture applies. You have a Heart, Head, and Body. You make decisions through Care, Think, and Act. You're somewhere on the spectrum from autopilot to authorship. And you have a Gold Star Kit — whether you've examined it or not.
Know your starting point. Then grow from there.
[Know Your Starting Point →] Rate yourself on the 58 Development Markers — character, thinking, and skills — and see where your strengths and growth edges are.
[Your Gold Star Kit →] Assess your own Purpose, Paradigm, and Practice — 15 questions across the three dimensions of your Kit.
[📖 The Personal Annual Review →] Twenty questions. Ninety minutes. An honest look at your year — what worked, what didn't, and what you want next. The PAR is a structured annual practice used by steamHouse mentors, participants, and families. It works whether you know the rest of the framework or not. Quick Check (20 min) or Full Review (90 min). Free download — no login, no email required.
[The Mentor Mirror →] If you work with young people — go deeper with instruments specific to the mentoring relationship: your stance, the safety you create, and the integrity question.
What makes these tools different? They're not personality tests. They don't sort you into types. They measure observable capability across four progression levels — Basic, Applying, Integrating, Teaching — so you can see where you actually are and what developing further looks like. The same 58 markers work whether you're 12 or 42.
For Parents and Families
Everything above applies to you, too — these are frameworks for being human, not just for leading teams. But if you're here specifically as a parent wondering what steamHouse means for your family, we have a page that speaks directly to that question: what your kids are actually up against, what helps, and how steamHouse works as a family experience — not just a program your child attends.
[Commons for Families →]
Explore the Core Curriculum
The core curriculum has two halves. The first is conceptual architecture — how decisions work, how you're built, what the principles are. The second is Development Markers — the 58 specific competencies the curriculum actually builds.
The architecture tells you how things work. The markers tell you what to develop.
How Things Work
[Autopilot →] Why it's the default — and why that's dangerous now
[Decision →] What a decision actually is — Care → Think → Act
[Mindsets →] Automatic, Conscious, Purposeful — and how to move between them
[Authorship →] Writing your own story, decision by decision
[Architecture →] How you're built — Heart, Head, Body mapped to Purpose, Paradigm, Practice
[Care Space →] How you're connected — from self to teams to communities to world
[Gold Star Kit →] A kit of bests you build, reference, and refine across Purpose, Paradigm, and Practice
[Principles →] What grounds it all — Reflective Thinking, Personal Agency, Mutual Respect, Objective Reason
[Meaning →] Purpose, worldview, and what matters — yours to discover
[Method →] Our epistemological position — how we think about thinking
What You Actually Build
[The 58 Markers →] Stars (character), Lenses (thinking), Keys (skills) — observable competencies across three dimensions of being human. Not grades. Not badges. Evidence that a person can actually do something.
[Explore & Rate Yourself →] Interactive explorer with self-rating — search, filter by stage, rate yourself on every marker
One Tool You Can Use Right Now
Not sure where to start? The Personal Annual Review is a structured 90-minute practice for honestly examining your year and recalibrating toward what matters. It works with or without the rest of the steamHouse framework. Over 20 questions across three dimensions — Purpose, Paradigm, and Practice — you'll surface what's working, what's drifting, and what deserves your attention next.
[Download the PAR (Free) →]