About
About Maine Organizer Studio
Maine Organizer Studio is a launch platform for Maine organizing, any of it. Housing, labor, climate, elections, mutual aid: if you're building something progressive in Maine and technology is in the way, that's what the studio is for. You don't need to be a disability organization; most of the groups we're built for aren't.
It's also disabled-led. Everything we ship works with a keyboard and a screen reader because the person building it is one of the people broken websites lock out, and the research arm exists for the same reason: someone in Maine should be keeping receipts.
Why this exists
Organizing in Maine runs on borrowed tools, expired free trials, and whoever's nephew once built a website. Meanwhile, a large share of the sites Mainers are required to use (to apply, register, donate, participate) don't work with a screen reader or a keyboard. Both of these are technical problems, and technical problems are fixable. That's the whole thesis.
The scan tells you what's broken; the studio fixes it.
Who's behind it
Right now, one disabled technologist in Maine, doing the work directly. A fuller introduction is coming; the work matters more than the bio.
How it's funded
At the moment: it isn't. The project runs on volunteered time, and no money has come in from anywhere. Donations are the eventual plan, once a mechanism exists, and it'll be announced here when it's real along with what the money pays for.
Commercial work is kept separate. Pinebit is a Maine software firm run by the same person, and businesses, institutions, and municipalities that want paid work go there. The studio side stays free for progressive organizing regardless of how that goes — that's a structural commitment, not a function of the budget.
The standard we hold ourselves to
This site targets WCAG 2.2 AA as a floor and does better where it can. There is no accessibility overlay widget here and there never will be. If you find something on this site that doesn't work with your assistive technology, tell us ; we treat it as a bug report against our own credibility.