Our ethos:

Community

We want:

…newcomers to feel welcome and able to join in

…regulars to get to know each other, and form a community spirit – where people are friendly to one another and pitch in

…to be a place, that people enjoy the social aspect of collaboration together. All chipping in with projects that benefit the community, as well as other projects that just excite each other.

… to be a place where people make connections with each other. Find great teammates the natural wayby working together and talking to each other

Creating bit by bit

Based on agile development practices, and the lean start up mentality, we build in frequent updates. While we like to know a big ambition for each project early on, we like to figure out the first thing we can get on screen and get that built. It’s a step by step thing.

There are a bunch of reasons why a step by step approach helps:

  • Looking at everything that needs to be built for a project can be daunting. To get through that, you have to do two things: a) break the challenge down into smaller more manageable chunks and b) make some progress. Going step by step, does both.
  • You can get better feedback and more excitement, from a slightly clunky early access beta, than you ever can from a description or design document. Since feedback is how you know how to make something perfect for your audience, (beyond your own needs and assumptions), getting good feedback early on, can really help projects be successful.
  • Keeping something to yourself while you perfect it, deprives the world of it while it’s in that “raw yet still kinda good” phase. A beta with only a few users, has more users than something sat on a hard drive.

So we like to ask, what’s the next step?

Variety – the spice of life!

Having some variety in life, really helps things stay fun.

We want there to be a variety of different projects for people to get involved with.

Useful apps.

Silly apps.

Games!

Information websites.

Interactive websites.

Weird Arduino projects (that just exist for fun videos and “because we could”).

Community tools to help build things more easily.

Make profit, if it doesn’t detract from a project.

We know, that some projects suit monetization, while others just don’t.

We also know, that many creators (including ProtoStart founders), want to be able to make a living off of some of their projects and also contribute for free to community projects.

So we welcome projects of different levels of “open source” and monetization, provided that any monetization won’t detract from the project or our community.

This means projects can include:

  • Fully “Open Source” projects that are entirely free to use and not monetized – (creators do it for the software and attribution without needing to make any money from it)
  • Projects with a tip jar or “buy the devs a coffee” feature
  • Open source projects which allow for making indirect profit, such as: paid add-on’s or support/customization contracts for enterprises. (Some companies pay contractors or companies to customize open source software to their needs, or to provide a level of ongoing support that you can’t expect from an open source project)
  • Paid software by startups and other online businesses (though we ask these to give contributions to our community and to anyone who collaborates on their projects as soon as they can – either with developer time, access to useful freebies or monetary)

Everyone included

We welcome:

  • people of all skill and experience levels
  • people of all backgrounds and cultures
  • people of all genders, non-genders, sexualities, religions, ethnicities and ways of being a person that you can think of.
  • users of all different operating systems and browsers

Just like it’s good to have a variety of different projects, it’s good to have a variety of different people – because then we get a better variety of ideas and projects, as well as being able to make projects that are great for a wider variety of people.

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