We believe in making the smallest amount of software to be useful to the largest amount of people in connecting residents to their government, their institutions, and each other.
Let’s break that down.
The smallest amount of software: this means that we don’t make a new piece of software when a perfectly suitable one already exists. This applies to open source, where we re-use and improve existing software that already has a community around it, rather than build from scratch. An example is the locator tool for Connect Chicago: we like Derek Eder’s searchable map template, but we needed a distributed set of people to be able to edit entries, so we had him make that.
It also means that we acknowledge and use the immense World Wide Web for what it is, rather than what part we want to own. An example of this is Foodborne Chicago, where, instead of making a new place for people to post messages about food poisoning, we go to the place where people are already talking about it. Our Patterns system is another example– this custom software fills in teeny gaps between Mailchimp, Wufoo, Outlook, and Ohours.
We believe in paying for software that other people have made, so as to support an ecosystem of good stuff. We understand that this increases the brittleness of our systems, because if a key element is removed (if Wufoo shuts down, for instance), we would have to find another service and re-create the proper hooks for us to do what we want. We like that better than the alternative, which is to maintain separate functionality, at a much greater overall cost.
to be useful: this means that we think, think, think, about everything before we make anything and test, test, test everything after we make it.
We think about “useful” in terms of two important audiences. The primary audience is regular residents— the millions of urban dwellers who need new tools and approaches to help make their lives better. A secondary audience is the developer community who makes tools for this these regular residents. With our developer services and hosting services, we build out this community and help strengthen it as a force for commercial software.
We host Mike Migurski’s Metro Extracts for this reason, as well as large data dumps of crime and weather data. In and of themselves, they don’t serve residents, but they allow for a greater fluidity of data that helps developers create new tools to do. We support these more research-oriented projects with server space and developer resources, but we probably wouldn’t subsidize developer time to create new software.
to the largest amount of people: our focus is Chicago, which is not a small place, but still narrows our focus. We seek to make Chicago a market laboratory for the rest of the world.
On the Chicago front, it means that we seek to create tools that are broadly appealing, especially to people with lower incomes living in neighborhoods that are not usually the focus of apps.
We create software that is valuable to anyone, regardless of income, vocation. They are equally useful to anyone in the city. We have a motto here. “Everybody means everybody”.
in connecting residents to their government: we are founded in part by the City of Chicago. This relationship is paramount. We
We also see them as services.
their institutions: just like there are enormous pieces of software out on the Web, there
lightweight connections between services. This is similar to our organization as a whole.
and each other: we think that government and institutions *is* each other. There’s really no difference.