Mission
At Heavy Element, our mission is to empower our customers through open, respectful, and ethical technology. We stand for digital autonomy, protecting the right and dignity of people, and fighting for a better future.
Principles
At Heavy Element, we abide by a few principles that guide our decision making and shape our efforts. We wanted to share these with you.
Openness First
Openness is a critical pathway to success. The modern world could not exist without the collaborative altruism of the nerds. Free and Open Source software makes it possible.
It's why the majority of our in-house code is free software. It's how we can keep our development costs down and pass the savings on to you.
But it's not just the letter of the free software law. It's also the spirit. See, we believe that the mandate of openness applies to most public goods.
We believe social networks must be open. We believe search engines must be open. We believe that public utilities must be open.
It's why we've heavily invested in Mastodon and the Fediverse, and why we advise our clients to be an early adopter of such tech. It's how we've been able to grow our own online profile. And how we've implemented likes, comments, and shares in our News section.
Respect For Your Customers
Treat others as you'd like to be treated. A wise maxim in life and in business. It's one we follow with rigor and it's one way we help our clients find success online.
Respect for your customers means engaging in ethical/minimal data collection, respecting their privacy, honoring their purchases, and making responsible decisions as a business.
Long-Term Planning
To some degree, the overarching hypothesis behind the first two principles could be abstracted to "long-term planning."
Openness means the decisions you make today are far less likely to be regrettable, and respecting your customers means a loyal and growing audience of customers.
We believe that short-term decision making ends up being a long-term disaster. That's why, whether we're designing a web page, making a video, or producing a podcast, we're always oriented towards the future.
Make decisions today that your future self will thank you for. After all, we the future belongs to them.
