Mission and Domains
Purposes
To advance public welfare by providing electronics to people in need.
To advance health by building and operating clinical informatics systems.
To advance health by investigating and facilitating drug development of interesting phytochemicals.
To advance public welfare and promote tolerance by improving interactions between organisations and the public.
To advance public welfare and promote policy change through disability and social advocacy.
To advance public welfare by providing training and work experience to people on pensions.
To advance national security by building technology systems which are secure and locally built, without commercial pressures.
To benefit the general public by making surplus resources from the above freely available, or available at cost price.
We may not do all of these things at once. We may find that one or two things work really well and focus on those. That's completely fine.
Approach
Our approach is the polar opposite of "move fast and break things." It is "move with care and create lasting change."
Our other motto is "getting it right by setting it right" — both socially and technically. If mistakes are unthinkable, you cannot set them right. A mistake doesn't mean someone has "won" or "lost": it simply means there is work to do.
Together, these concepts recognise that nothing is perfect, certainly not the first time, but with consistent effort we can converge on better outcomes.
On the tech side, we like to reinvent the wheel. This is partly because it's good for building skills, but primarily because most proverbial wheels are made in the USA. We cannot entirely avoid connection to the country. But we can reduce it.
We are not big on job titles, except where legally or practically required. What's much more important is skillsets.
Strategy
Kickoffs
The trick to creating change at scale across a very wide range of domains while remaining small and agile is controlling scope via stage.
If we set things in motion, other more established organisations can sustain the effort long-term. We can contribute the unique bits that nobody else has, and gracefully handover towards business as usual.
People Receiving Pensions
For volunteers, we look for people who have disabilities as well as single parents. This gives them a sense of purpose, builds directly employment-related skills, and gives them bona fide work experience.
There are a significant number of people in these groups who are highly capable and full of potential, but don't neatly fit into the box they need to in order to consistently retain full time employment. More flexible contracting-style roles are usually reserved for senior specialists who already have all the skills they need. We aim to build a bridge for these people by giving them real-world work experience which they can do in their own time, at their own pace.
It is quite common to have people (like myself) with disabilities who shut down under pressure, but can move mountains when they are left alone to concentrate and nobody's shoving them to meet external standards in order to survive. Let's create a new way that works for them.
This also plays into the organisation mission: we exist entirely outside of commercial pressures. The usual causes of enshittification are completely absent. There are no shareholders to pay. The result is that we get to take a very different approach to engineering, and can be much more detail-oriented and less sensitive to time pressure.
We make haste slowly, because slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Removing the pressure can help us do more and better work.