Sensors, fundamentally, are dumb. They simply send bits of raw data concerning process or product to your account on the server. They know nothing of the larger context in which you work. For example, during a typical day, you might work on several distinct tasks: an hour in the morning on requirements for an upcoming project, and two hours in the afternoon on maintenance fixes to an old system. For your requirements project, you are working in a team with one other person, while the system maintenance and development involves 12 people. In most cases, you will want to analyze your requirements data separately from your maintenance data. You will also probably want to gain a higher level perspective on the progress of the requirements project by combining the relevant data from your Hackystat account with the relevant data from the other person working with you. Similarly, it would be helpful to combine together the relevent data from all 12 people working on maintenance to see how that project is progressing.

The "Project" construct in Hackystat is designed to satisfy this need to specify a context for analysis of sensor data, including the set of workspaces containing the artifacts associated with the Project, the set of Hackystat users who are participating in the Project and whose sensor data should be combined together, and the time period during which the Project was underway.