Pilothouse is Full Harbor's series of time-boxed, thesis-driven working groups. Each one starts with a question that the field has — and has been answering wrong, or not at all — because the knowledge is siloed, episodic, and evaporates every time a commodore rotates out or a GM leaves.
Every working group follows the same structure: we build the border from public data, practitioners fill in the interior, and the completed picture goes back to the field — permanently, for free, for anyone who needs it next year.
See the working groups ↓Before there are working groups, there is a commons. Harbor Commons is Full Harbor’s first public infrastructure tool — a free, permanently maintained index of IRS 990 XML filings for sailing clubs, waterfront nonprofits, and adjacent organizations. Built entirely from public records, designed for the people closest to the water.
Think of each working group as a puzzle. Full Harbor builds the border from public data — the frame that defines the problem and shows its shape. Practitioners contribute the interior pieces: the ground truth, the context, the numbers behind the numbers. Neither half is useful without the other. The completed puzzle goes back to the field.
The knowledge practitioners carry is some of the most valuable intelligence in this field. It's also the most vulnerable — it lives in people, not systems. Every leadership transition, every board rotation, every GM departure takes a piece of it with them. Pilothouse is how it stays.
Each working group has a public data border already built and practitioner-contributed interior pieces that remain open. Click any card to see what's built, what's missing, and what the completed picture makes possible.
The dominant national sailing insurance program pools 1,300+ organizations, priced for the whole pool — which skews coastal, skews marina-heavy, and skews toward hurricane and storm surge exposure. An inland freshwater club is priced into the same actuarial bucket as a coastal yacht club facing category-three season every year. National claims data shows storm and wind at roughly 23% of all paid claims over the past decade. Inland programs are subsidizing that exposure. With public 990 data, a coalition of clubs, and a major industry symposium on the calendar, the leverage window is open.
A week of sailing camp at a well-run club is roughly $400. DFW club soccer runs $3,000–$10,000 per year. The sticker price is comparable. The infrastructure cost isn’t in the same universe: behind that $400 is a fleet, a waterfront, safety boats, insurance, docks, and instructors. Soccer uses a public field maintained by tax dollars. The conversation about access and affordability can’t happen honestly until both sides of that comparison are visible. This working group makes it visible.
The brief is a practitioner-first peer comparison built entirely from public 990 data for 10+ Texas sailing clubs. Revenue trends, officer rosters, expense breakdowns, program descriptions. The framing is appreciative inquiry: what’s working, where are the patterns, what can the network learn from itself. The IRS data is the scaffold. Practitioners fill in the context the 990 can’t capture.
"What age can my kid start?" "Do you provide boats?" "What's included in the camp fee?" "Are there scholarships?" These questions land in every club's inbox every March. Each club builds its own answer, in isolation, every year, with no connection to what the network knows. Ask a Sailor is the shared front door — an AI agent backed by each club's verified program data, available to any parent, in any market, at any hour. The agent gets smarter with every club that contributes. The contribution threshold is low. The value compounds.
If you run a waterfront organization and you're sitting on knowledge the field needs — insurance renewal numbers, program cost data, claims history, the context behind a 990 line — this is the working group for you. You don't need to commit to anything beyond a conversation.