workshop

During the "industrial era", a workshop may be a room or building which provides both the area and tools (or machinery) that may be required for the manufacture or repair of manufactured goods. Workshops were the only places of production until industrialisation and its larger factories.

During the "information era", a workshop describes an office or conference room meeting intended to create or generate plans, analysis, or design to support organizational efforts. Some people would differentiate a meeting from a workshop by suggesting that a meeting may contain an array of topics not dependent on each other in the sequence listed. For example, in a traditional "board of directors meeting", the treasurer's report appears early but it could be moved to one of the last items on the agenda without affecting other business of the meeting. Frequently workshops are focused on creating or delivering something (e.g., process improvement) and the sequence or order of the agenda items is critical to the development of the meeting output, frequently called a "deliverable".