What Keeps Me Working on Local Stuff
I live in Keokuk, and a chunk of what I build never leaves it. None of these projects are the ones that pay the bills — they're the ones I end up doing at night because I noticed a gap and couldn't leave it alone.
The Pattern
It usually starts the same way: something local is harder to find, track, or organize than it should be, and I already have the tools to fix that specific piece of it. So I build the small thing, put it online, and it either sticks around or it doesn't.
This isn't a grand plan for civic tech. It's closer to a habit — see a rough edge, sand it down, move on.
Why Bother
A national-scale project competes with a lot of noise and a lot of better-funded teams. A Keokuk-scale project doesn't — if it's useful to the people actually here, that's the whole bar. That's a satisfying kind of small.
I'll probably keep writing about individual projects as they're actually ready to show, rather than the plans for them. The finished thing is always more interesting than the pitch.