The FLOW Syllabus is tailored to an intellectually advanced audience of educators, including instructors, advisers and autonomous learners. 

In assembling and maintaining this curated collection, we do not shy away from concepts or issues that demand deep thinking. On the contrary, this syllabus moves deliberately in the other direction, helping learners to think much more deeply about many issues that are too often taken for granted. 

This orientation shows up in various communications tactics, such as sometimes employing a semantically transparent phrase such as "constraints on the flow of ideas" in place of a very familiar but opaque word like "patents". Another example is our referring in a heading to "good values" and "good value" when the topics are "ethics" and "cost-efficiency". 

Moreover, our whole effort throughout the syllabus is expressed through the metaphor of moving water, or sometimes moving in water. This mental image provides a great deal of room for creativity in developing elegant ways to convey the many complex issues. Managers of free/libre/open projects don't just seek to clearly understand these topics, but just as importantly, they know that they must communicate the topics effectively to their own team members, executives, business partners and customers or constituents. 

Given the significance of effective communication to any project manager's performance, it is our working assumption that the training of a manager is really a type of train-the-trainer challenge and opportunity. 

This implies that our full target audience extends well beyond the managers who would learn this material directly. We're also thinking the people that they are communicating with, their stakeholders upon they depend upon to accomplish project outcomes. The free/libre/open paradigm optimizes distributed inter-organizational effort, not hierarchical command and control. It is when managers who learn from The FLOW Syllabus can effectively share these concepts and issues with others, then we will have help them to advance their free/libre/open projects.