DIYcity Design Principles

DIYcity's mission is to create an open toolset that residents of all cities, everywhere, can use as they see fit to improve life in those cities. As such, DIYcity applications, regardless of who builds them, should attempt to follow a simple set of design principles, to ensure that they help us achieve our goals. These principles are as follows.

DIYcity applications should ideally be:

1. built to address real needs of people as they relate to the cities around them

2. built in a way that allows them to be easily adopted by cities and towns everywhere (as much as is reasonably as possible)

3. built using free, open technologies

4. platform agnostic - they should avoid lock-in to one particular platform wherever possible

5. be replicable - easy for others to set up and repeat locally in their own areas.

6. designed to take advantage of both pre-existing datasets and user input

7. be modular, for ease of combining and interchanging parts

8. be extensible, allowing for improvement and iteration

These principles should be used as a guideline and should not dissuade anyone from building or submitting an application to DIYcity.