I've been in a number of real charettes -- they are, as mentioned, intense working sessions, usually with people who have some expertise (architects, designers, artists) on the problem at hand. The degradation of the term is exactly the same thing that happened with "workshop" -- hardly anyone now remembers that a workshop was once somewhere where someone made something, like shoes!!! Like practically all these things, they are bureaucratized attempts to pretend linguistically that some serious intense work is going to go on communally, when they are really just one more meeting to push paper around.

A good charette, however, is real work.

Peter T.