About The Seattle Digital Commons

Seattle Digital Commons is a 501(c)(3) organization building a five-person crew of University of Washington student volunteers to deliver public-interest software on 90-day timelines. We follow the proven Oregon State Open-Source Lab model where students ship production code while being mentored by senior engineers.

We focus on problems where residents are already creating their own workarounds, using AI tools to compress projects that normally take years into a single academic quarter. Our current focus areas are housing permits, transportation, and digital access.

Why We Exist

Seattle's housing crisis, transportation problems, and digital equity gaps need solutions now, not in five years. We form small teams of students, designers, and policy experts, give them clear authority, and ship working software in three months. Everything we build is open source and measured against real outcomes.

Historical Precedents

History shows that focused teams with clear mandates can deliver extraordinary results in months, not years:

How We Work

• •Speed matters — slow solutions help no one
• •Small teams work better — five focused students beat fifty committees
• •90-day cycles — measurable results every quarter
• •Clear ownership — one person makes decisions
• •Show, don't tell — weekly demos beat status reports
• •Open by default — public code, public data
• •Question everything — process exists to serve outcomes

Call to Action