This isn’t the internet we want
Our industry is driven by profit over everything else
Metric chasing, relentless growth hacking and KPIs rule. The sudden deluge of generative AI slop is polluting every corner of the web in the name of “innovation” and “progress” too.
Progress towards what is not clear, beyond making the rich, richer. This isn’t the internet that we want, and it’s certainly not the internet that we, as a global community, built in the first place.
Progressive causes are left behind while destructive causes prosper
Those with the deepest pockets can access the best agencies to build their brands and products, but progressive causes — fighting for progress and pushing back against the tide of challenges facing everyday people — are usually run on minimal budgets. They’re rarely able to build the kind of digital experiences and command mainstream media attention that will help advance their cause. It’s these causes that truly need the most help.
Meanwhile, destructive causes are flush with funding, attention and endless mainstream media coverage. It’s not a fair fight.
We’ve come up with a plan to help supercharge progressive causes and front-end education
We’ve pivoted our business model to enable us to empower progressive movements by designing and building great web experiences for them, for free.
Our community will benefit from this too, as we’ll work on these projects in the open, allowing us to create high quality, genuine real world front-end education, entirely free of cost or subscription.
With this process we hope to play a small part in supporting the front-end community to fight for web standards, progressive enhancement, and human centred design — helping more people build corners of the internet that work for everyone.
With your support, we can actually make a difference to both the design and development community, as well as progressive movements that make the lives of those people that really need help tangibly better. Here’s how that will work.
- 01.
- We use the funding to design and build free web projects for typically under-funded progressive organisations
- 02.
- We work on these projects in the open, documenting the entire process and sharing key insights to how these projects work in a leading agency
- 03.
- These open projects provide access to free real world, high quality front-end education resources
- 04.
- We move towards our vision of front-end education that helps lead the fight to build a web that works for everyone
Why Open Collective?
We chose Open Collective because it’s transparent and working with a crowd-funded model requires trust. Anyone can see how much we’ve raised and where the money goes. The biggest benefit of crowd-funding through Open Collective is it enables us to build our business around giving back more than it receives which is what it was set up to do from the outset.
We’re blowing the doors wide open to how a leading agency works so our community can learn from real world experience.
Always transparent
Agencies typically work secretively behind closed doors and you only ever see the output, not the process that achieves that output. We’re going to show both the highs and the lows. Importantly, we’re going to show you how to navigate those.
Real world front-end education
We’ll share as much as is feasible, allowing us to offer extremely high quality education that demonstrates how projects are run in the real world which is a refreshing change from out of context demos we typically see.
Free at the point of entry
This content will be free for everyone, forever. We’re doing this without subscriptions, paywalls or harvesting people’s personal data.
Fighting for web standards
We’re determined to demonstrate that leaning into progressive enhancement, web standards, performance optimisation and rejecting dark patterns produces outstanding work that both looks great and works great for everyone
Progressive organisations and campaigns for good are typically poorly funded, but they are needed now more than ever. By offering free web projects to carefully chosen projects that are pushing for change, we aim to amplify their impact.
We will use the Open Collective funding to provide a fantastic web presence — for free — to organisations that genuinely make people’s lives better, to help level the playing field.
We want to empower these causes to make change in the world, by helping supercharge them where they need it most — design, messaging and web presence.
We as a community need to do everything we can to counter the extensive damage that is being done
Our industry’s reputation is eroding fast, dragged down by the sprint towards AI, vapourware, hype cycles and shortcuts to extract as much profit as possible.
Our industry is invested in making AI the future at any cost. To counter this, content centred on the craft and focusing on doing right for users needs greater representation.
We want to empower the front-end community to fight for web standards, progressive enhancement and human centered design to build web experiences that work for everyone.
Our aim to to work full time on open projects but we can’t do that without your help. Whatever you can afford goes a long way to making that happen.
Support Piccalilli on Open Collective