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.
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
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 — not unlike myself — who are highly capable and have a lot 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.
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.