The Pool is a collaborative environment for sharing art, text, and code.

Click a menu item at left to learn more or just visit the next screen.

In the Art Pool, you can find interesting projects in any of these ways:

• Approval: The vertical position of the project tells you whether the community has rated it high or low.
• Recognition: The horizontal position of the project tells you how many reviews it has received.
• Volume: The size of the title reflects how many versions have been produced for that project.
• Intent: Mouse over a project title to read the first few lines of its intent.

Click on the Options button at upper right to access these controls:

• Filters: Show only projects that match a given author, subject, or license (or a combination of these).
• Buttons: Adjust The Pool's layout engine to favor legibility, accuracy, or a balance of the two.
• Search: Type a few letters into the search box to filter by title.

Click on a title to open its Project Information Panel, which gives you access to:

• General: Read more about the project's contributors, subjects, and license terms.
• Reviews: Click on the review tab to read reviews, or click "review this version" to add your own (requires login).
• Versions: Click on the boxes at left to choose among various intents, approaches, or releases.

If you want to add reviews or projects, you'll need an account. Click on links at left to learn more about joining up.

You need to be logged in to add a review or project. If you are not already logged in, click on the Log in button from the collapsible menu at top to get a login panel.

If you don't already have an account, you can register for one on the Pool home page.

Your login will look something like lastnamefirstnameXX, where XX is two integers (often 01) and all characters are run together with lower case.

Click Log In to continue. Once you login once, you shouldn't have to log in again for future Pool sessions on the same computer (unless you have disabled cookies).

Once logged in, click on My Account in the collapsible menu at top to open your account panel.

Click on the account tab and fill out all the fields, changing your password if you like. Click the Update Account Settings button at bottom to save this information.

Also click on Upload Thumbnail to add a 100x100 pixel image of yourself.

If you're logged in, you can rate any Pool project, at whatever stage. Click on links at left to learn more about adding reviews.

You need to be logged in to add a review. If you are not already logged in, click on the Log in button from the collapsible menu at top to get a login panel.

Click on a floating title to open the details panel for the project you wish to review.

Pool projects often have many versions, so click on one of the little boxes at left to ensure you have the appropriate version selected (usually the latest). Then click on + Add Review.

After the Review Panel opens, you are asked to supply a brief, non-evaluative description of the project. This is because all of the projects described in The Pool live out on the Internet, where sites are born and die with some frequency. If you can supply this, you will help future surfers imagine projects that might have been quite worthwhile but that have succumbed to technological obsolescence or some other form of digital oblivion.

Here's where you add your evaluation. 10 is best, 1 is worst, and N/A means you cannot evaluate this aspect (either because you do not feel qualified or for technical reasons).

Click the submit button to complete your review.

An intent is an idea for a project. To add one to The Pool, you only need a title, a paragraph or two, and some sense of the themes and behaviors the project might engage.

You need to be logged in to add a project. If you are not already logged in, click on the Log in button from the collapsible menu at top to get a login panel.

Click on the Creation button in the collapsible menu to begin.

Fill out a title (with normal capitalization, etc.), a url (if you have one), attribution (the contributors' names), and the subjects (related themes). Be sure to include your class ("capstone-2007" etc.) if appropriate.

Click on the + button to add multiple entries in a category.

Describe the idea for your project.

Since you don't know what medium your intent may be realized in, check any medium-independent behaviors that apply. For example, an experiment in physical computing might be installed, interactive, and encoded.

For more on behaviors, review the terms at the Variable Media Network.

You can type in requests for collaborators, debugging, or other suggestions.

Submit your intent and you're done!

Once you begin work on your project, you can add an approach or release.

Approaches are documents like renderings and flowcharts that help you plan your project. Releases are actual prototypes or working versions that you have built. As long as you have urls for these, you can add them to The Pool for others to rate.

Open the project panel for your intent and click on + Add Approach.

In the Approach panel, add the url for your plan (and a url for the source file of your plan, if you wish to share it).

Under attribution, add the contributors' names and roles. Possible roles include conceptual (lightbulb), perceptual (eye), and technical (gear).

In the type tab, check off as many approach types as you have included at the url entered under basics.

If you are proceeding directly to release, you can skip most of the steps in the approach form, but make sure to check Direct implementation.

Click a license if you know which you want. Or Show terms and check off any rights you want to reserve. If you pick a combination that adds up to a particular license, the panel will alert you to this fact.

Once you're done filling out all the tabs, click submit to complete the approach.

To add a release, use the staggered boxes in the left side of the project panel to navigate to the approach this release will follow. Then click on + Add Release.

Otherwise adding a release is very similar to adding an approach. Simply fill out the tabs and click submit when you're done.

References are works created outside of The Pool, such as The Mona Lisa, Gone with the Wind, or I Can't Get No Satisfaction. Tracked in the Reference Pools, these works have already been published and are not usually available for collaboration or re-use.

Pool users can, however:

• Add references to the Reference Pools.
• Review references.
• Add relationships between references and projects in the Creation Pools (see Relationships at left).
• Add relationships between two references (to come).

To add a reference, click the Add Ref. button in the top menu to open a Reference panel.

Type the first three letters of the work's title, then click on the drop-down menu to check if the work is already in The Pool. If not, add the title (capitalized as it would be written).

Add a url for the work itself or for documentation of it (eg, from Wikipedia). Then add any subjects you think appropriate (click on the + to add more than one subject).

Type three letters of the author's name to check if the author is already in The Pool. If so, select the author; if not, type the author's name as it would be written. (Note that authors of references are tracked independently of authors who collaborate in The Pool.) If you don't know the author, select "unknown".

If you know the date this work was published/launched/created, type it in the date field. (Use January 1 if you only know the year.)

Type a bibliographic entry for this work in the citation field. If you don't know the proper way to cite the artifact, use the formula Author. _Title_. Date.

Type a paragraph describing the artifact, then click submit to finish adding the reference.

Assigning a relationship can help show how one project in The Pool influenced another.

Any logged-in user can assign a relationship between two projects, but the number and kind of such assignments affects the strength of the relationship. A relationship assigned by a descendant counts more than one assigned by an ancestor, and a relationship assigned by an ancestor counts more than one assigned by a third party.

Open a Project panel for a work you want to relate to previous works and click on +Add relationship.

In the Relations panel that opens next, choose the type of relation from the drop-down menu.

Pick a target by typing the first three letters of the title, then choosing from the resulting list of projects.

Describe the way the target project influenced you (if you are the author) or why you see a resemblance (if you are a third party). Once you're done filling out the tabs, click submit to finish.