Our Guiding Principles

1. Do the right thing.Create what helps and decline what harms. We trust our members to follow the same simple credo.
2. Respect privacy.We require only the minimum information needed to transmit deliverables and collect payment. Prof.dottie will not workshop, and pbdot will not build, tools that require access to, or that operate within, your e-mail or other on-line personal or organizational accounts.
3. Follow first principles thinking.Deconstruct tasks into building block components based on foundational equations and methods.
4. Build it blind.Develop your scope of work and custom software without raw data using synthetic modeling approaches where necessary. “We don't trust anyone with your data — not even ourselves.” — Prof.dottie
5. Build on the commons.Respectfully use open-source and public-domain methods and information. Focus on verified, validated academic and public sources. When and where necessary, help members find commercial companion software for them to purchase separately to fully meet their needs.
6. Show our work.We cite our sources, methods, and engines.
7. Measure our carbon footprint.We estimate it for our cloud-compute, LLM inference, and computer run-time. We report it and work to shrink it.
8. Speed is a means, not the goal.Fast enough to support member requests while maintaining high quality and staying true to our Guiding Principles. Not as fast as possible.
9. Answer for our machine intelligence.A named person directs and reviews everything we develop. We hold our human oversight to auditable standards, and our goal is continuous improvement leading to independent certification for ethical AI.
10. Teach you to fish.We're glad to help you outgrow us. If you graduate to building your own software we will send you a certificate.

"Do the right thing" we borrow, with gratitude, from Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation.