Every now and then, if you’re lucky and you treat your clients well (i.e., you do good work, you don’t charge too much, and you aren’t a pain to work with) one of them will come back with a really special project with your name on it. Those are great days, truly. The only thing that can top them is when a client comes back with a project that might just change the world for the better. No matter how busy you are with other business, no matter how overworked you are, those are the times when you have to decide that this is what you’re in the business for in the first place.

In the fall of 2006, Bill White, the Salameno Director of Educational Program Development for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and a gentleman we’d worked for a few times, called with just such an opportunity. He called one afternoon to say he wanted to create a fully digital, online civics course. That sounded interesting, technically… but it was the way he described the goal that raised goosebumps. He wanted to create a course that would show high school kids what America meant. He wanted to show that America was an ongoing debate between a number of important but opposing ideas and that this debate was ongoing and vibrant and exciting. He talked about how these ideas, these values were always in tension in America. Freedom was at odds with equality, Unity with diversity. The concepts of common wealth battled those of private wealth and law (what was legal) battled ethics (what was right). For example, he said America is a nation of laws, we hate it when a person breaks the law and gets away with it and yet we make heroes of law breakers like Rosa Parks. We hate the idea of communism and socialism but don’t threaten to take away social security. This debate, he said, could be seen in today’s newspapers as clearly as they could be seen in the broadsides of the 18th century. He wanted to invite America’s high schoolers to join that debate.

I know, right?

Though the project didn't have a name at that point, fittingly, it would later become The Idea of America. How could we turn down the opportunity to participate in that? To make the point more clearly, try to remember what our country looked like in the fall of 2006. It seemed to me that this was the perfect solution for those times. So, we looked at our busy schedule and made a few phone calls and said, “We're in.”

You start off approaching them as you would any normal project