Today we built something that matters.

It started with a compliance question about WCAG and CJIS and whether Forge hosting could pass muster for a government platform. It ended with 11 domains, a Forge server, a Linear initiative, a fact-checked pitch deck with interactive charts, and a landing page where physics-driven shooting stars fall through a Tennessee night sky while fireflies hover above words that link to a future we haven't built yet.

What is Porchlight?

Porchlight is an open-source civic government + school district platform for small-town America. One platform. One login. A parent pays their water bill and checks their kid's grades in the same session. No other product on Earth does this.

CivicPlus doesn't do schools. PowerSchool doesn't do towns. Porchlight does both.

The Name

The name comes from my mother, Sharon Snell (April 4, 1951 — April 3, 2024). She was raised in Atoka — on Brunswick — in a tiny neighborhood where everybody knew everybody. When I was a kid, she would leave the porchlight on so I could find my way home in the dark.

Her door was always open. She always had a room ready for anyone who needed it. She has left the light on for us — and within us.

What We Built Today

  • Pitch document (project-porchlight.html): 9-section interactive pitch with Chart.js radar charts, gap analysis tables, 5-year TCO projections, compliance assessment, module breakdowns for 20 civic + school modules, and a 5-step rollout from Atoka to rural America
  • Fact-checked: 4 parallel agents verified every claim — market sizes, competitor features, compliance certs, pricing, revenue math. Fixed Atoka's population (10,008 not 1,200), reframed AI claims (all incumbents launched AI in 2025-2026), corrected revenue projections ($1.5M not $1.92M)
  • Landing page (porchlight-landing.html): Black sky, stars, physics shooting stars with gravity and drag, canvas firefly lights with wind gusts hovering above prose-embedded domain links, cursor lantern with spring physics, touch ripples, gyroscope parallax for iPad, ambient cricket audio with daily rotation
  • 11 domains: porchlight.town (primary), .city, .systems, .academy, .digital, .company, .technology, .ventures, .fyi, .in, .foundation
  • Infrastructure: Cloudflare zones created, DNS pointed, Forge server provisioned, 11 sites deployed, SSL in progress
  • Linear: Initiative + two projects (Porchlight Civic, Porchlight Schools) with full module specs

The Verse

"You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden." — Matthew 5:14

The Directive

Physics is now a part of everything we do. If it moves, it has mass.

Reflection: This session was supposed to be about compliance checkboxes. It became about something bigger. Sometimes the most important work you do in a day starts with a question you didn't expect to matter. The grass is greener where you water it. Porchlight can illuminate that.