FIR 003: Find Your Path — The FIR Curriculum & Framework Orientation
How to read this course. FIR 003 (Find Your Path) is a short, free companion course — a guided walk to the trailhead. It sits beside the Free Foundation rather than inside it: the Foundation sequence remains BSE 099 (Why This Matters) → BSE 100 (Source Discipline & Methodology) → BSE 101 (Individual Readiness) → BSE 102 (Household Readiness), taken in that order, and this course points you to it rather than replacing it. Its whole job is wayfinding: by the end you will hold the map of the entire curriculum, understand at a glance what the framework is building toward, know which of the three tracks fits your role, and have a concrete next enrollment. Six short lessons, no knowledge checks along the way, and a single friendly completion check at the end that issues your certificate. Nothing here is an exam; it is a map you keep.
New to FIR and facing a wall of courses? Start here. FIR 003 is a short, free wayfinding course: it hands you the map of the whole FIR curriculum and shows you your path through it — where to begin, what comes next, which track fits your role, and where it all leads. Along the way it orients you, at survey depth, to the framework the courses are teaching you to build: the FIR CI Reference Architecture, Diamond Blue certification, the three resilience vectors, Diamond-N, the tier ladder, and the OODA-loop pedagogy that runs through every course. FIR 003 is free, permanently free, and open to anyone — it is optional for every track and is not a prerequisite or a gate for anything. It teaches almost none of the content itself; instead it points you to the courses that do, in the order that fits you, so your very next enrollment is the right one. About 30–45 minutes, six short lessons, and one friendly completion check — a welcome and a map, not an exam. This course orients; it does not instruct: it tells you what each piece of the framework is and where it is taught, never how to perform it. It gives no legal advice, and every question of law, licensure, or authority is routed to the courses and counsel that own it. Audience: anyone deciding where to start.
What this course is. FIR 003 orients; it does not instruct. It names the pieces of the FIR framework and tells you which course teaches each one — it never teaches the methodology, scoring, or mechanics itself (those live in the courses it points to). It gives no legal advice; questions of law, licensure, emergency powers, or authority are answered by the courses and counsel that own them, not here. Course numbers in FIR reflect when a course was developed, not the order you take it — follow the tracks and the prerequisites on each course card, not the numbering. Everything FIR 003 describes about the curriculum is current as of this course's publication; the live catalog at fir.foundation/ is always the authority if the two ever differ.