Go look. Then decide
what would help.

Start with the problem.

A map can meet a specification and still leave an important question unanswered. An agency can explain its own decisions without anyone explaining the experience of the person moving through the whole system.

The people maintaining the data need answers they can use. The person waiting for help needs the system to work. Groundtruth begins with those people and follows the gap between what a system says it does and what happens.

The form of the work follows what the evidence says would help.

Built by following questions.

I did not begin with an organization chart. I kept following problems I couldn’t put down.

A conversion that should be easier. Data checks that need to explain their findings. A response timeline that is difficult to see from beginning to end. Practical knowledge that exists, but is hard to find when someone needs it.

So I started building. The Groundtruth Schema Bridge is available as a free public beta. The Groundtruth Validation Workbench is the central technical effort I want to take further. The Aggregation Point gives practitioners a place to share what they know. CALL WAITING follows questions about emergency response into the public record.

These projects do different jobs. The commitment underneath them is consistent: understand the system well enough to leave something useful for the people living and working inside it.

The work is underway. Sustained funding is still needed, especially to advance the Workbench. The next phase should give this work continuity and make room for paid collaborators.

See the work and where it’s headed ↗

Independent, on purpose.

I want to be able to follow a problem even when it falls between contracts, departments, or product boundaries. To say when something is not working. To acknowledge what I do not know. And to change course when the evidence calls for it.

Human dignity and respect for the people doing the work are part of that commitment. Public-safety work should take practitioners’ knowledge and constraints seriously, make its limits visible, and keep the person depending on the system in view.

Groundtruth is the practice I am building to work that way. Support should strengthen that independence, with room for honest findings, disagreement, and correction.

Independence does not mean doing everything alone, or expecting other people to work for free. Funding should make careful work sustainable and pay the people contributing to it.

— Kaitlin Quinn

Read the working principles or help move the work forward.

A focus, with a wider field of view.

Groundtruth’s focus is public safety. The same habit of checking representations against reality also informs my work elsewhere, including Portland TRAP, a separate transportation accountability project, and The Portland Porch, a place to explore Portland through maps and research.

Those connections help me ask better questions. They do not require every project to become the same organization.

More about Kaitlin and the broader body of work ↗