Development Recipe

Development.Recipe is a label on this site. I link it at the top of the site under the name Development Recipes.

I didn't set out to solve small town development. I applied for a job in a small town, didn't get it and a few months later the guy who did get it -- Wil Russoul -- said to me one day "If I QUIT, I'll recommend you as my replacement. You could totally do this job."

He was clearly frustrated with the job and when he said it, he didn't yet know I had also applied for the job. I told him that day or at a later date shortly after he said that to me.

He knew me as a volunteer and freelance writer. Soon after he said that to me, other people in town began telling me "You might get another shot at the job." 

So whatever he was upset about, he wasn't the only person that realized he wasn't cutting it. Something happened that I didn't happen to witness but everyone who was anyone realized at the same time he really couldn't do the job.

I'm seriously medically handicapped and I was extremely poor and I knew I had both logistical challenges in doing ANY full-time job and I also needed to prove to people that I could bring it -- that I not only knew my stuff but could execute -- in spite of not making a good first impression.

So I was doing research, including temporarily returning to active participation on Cyburbia after years away from it, and trying to get all my ducks in a row both to prove myself to people in town and get something like "extra test time" to accommodate my handicap. I sometimes need more time than other people to do stuff because of my situation.

It took me a long, long time to meet some of my goals. It took me a year or more to find Stamen maps, a free resource for making maps under a creative commons license that was adequate quality for my purposes and still user friendly and FREE. 

And I have a Certificate in GIS from the world's foremost GIS program. Most people aren't half as qualified as I am to even identify what qualifies as a good mapmaking resource adequate to serve a program like this both in terms of being adequate quality and low enough cost.

It took me a year or more to accidentally trip across the brown, blue and white color scheme I wanted and had been actively searching for on the Internet for Mid Century Modern design. I spent TWO years talking to locals and researching stuff online to develop a website for Aberdeen.

No, I wasn't working full-time on this. But Wil Russoul was Meeting Man and measuring his so-called productivity in how many meetings he had a month while doing tons of REQUIRED paperwork for the Main Street program. 

I began wondering how ANYONE could POSSIBLY effectively do the job in question because I was sitting there thinking "If they were PAYING ME while I told them for a YEAR I'm working on that. I haven't found what I'm looking for yet, they would FIRE me."

I was a homemaker for two decades. I'm not good at pretending to work. I'm not good at playing the game and going through the motions to keep my boss off my back while I punch a clock and playing the game was probably taking Wil Russoul sixty hours a week, leaving NO time to ACTUALLY do the executive function part of his Executive Director job.

And even if I were good at playing the game and NOT medically handicapped, I don't know how anyone can spend sixty hours a week going through the motions and playing the game and on top of that finding solutions like I was working on.

If you are being run ragged with pointless meetings and checking off boxes to keep your job, you can't think and plan, which is what executives are supposed to do.

My original, unpublished version of the first site listed Eclogiselle as a side business for me to do consulting work to help other towns in the region outside of my day job because the job in question is about developing Aberdeen's downtown in specific. That got edited out when I chose to give up on ever getting the job and published an edited version of the site that removed all the "I have this job" parts of the site.

So I'm medically handicapped and don't really want a full-time job of any sort, much less a full-time salaried job that's extremely likely to wind up being sixty hours a week, not forty, and imagining I'm going to be the new Executive Director of the local Main Street program AND somehow run a consulting business "on the side" as a means to solve problems I felt I would be held responsible for solving but which couldn't reasonably be solved by limiting my efforts to "fixing downtown."

I don't really want to work more than, say, thirty hours a week and I'm writing up solutions that would likely take eighty or more hours a week to implement. And I'm essentially increasingly going "I don't think this Main Street program works, to be honest."

The scope of the job was crazy and on top of that the Main Street America program is weirdly bureaucratic and has ridiculous levels of paperwork required to just keep your status as an affiliate while they do things like TELL you to design a style guide rather than spoon feed all members access to a pre-existing set of style guides to choose from so as to MAKE it more manageable and something feasible for a one person shop to implement this program and it's so-called "requirements" (that don't get you booted for failing to implement).

As it became clear to me they were never going to hire me and I didn't really want the job anymore and would turn it down if offered it, I began contemplating Eclogiselle as a potential stand alone business. 

I play a lot of games, like SimCity and Oregon Trail Boomtown. A lot of games have a tech tree.

So you need X thing developed before you can access Y thing and you need a certain level of population to open up new levels and thereby open up new tech, etc.

One reason small towns face development challenges is because urban planning requires substantial education and urban planning solutions are typically custom solutions from highly educated and well-paid people.

I can't wave a magic wand and make the need for a lot of expertise and education go away and small towns can't magic up the money to pay huge upfront prices for custom solutions that will generally only serve a relatively small number of people.

That's the crux of why most planning resources are written by, for and about big cities. 

But what if I identified some common patterns and established some general recipes? Could I make an app or add a little custom work to that to give small towns something affordable that actually makes business sense for the person selling the solutions?

Could I make a questionnaire and if you sign up for my app and answer some questions, I then kick back some recommendations based on what you tell me fitting to a particular pattern?

I don't know how to get there from here or if I even want to try. I don't know if that idea really makes sense even.

But that's the origin story for that label on the site and why I am slowly adding labels like Africa and Asia to pieces on the site.