> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.kaitlinquinn.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # For-Profit, Nonprofit, Anti-Profit - URL: https://www.kaitlinquinn.com/blog/for-profit-nonprofit-anti-profit/ - Published: 2026-10-29T02:51:28.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-29T02:51:28.000Z - Description: TL;DR I’m building Groundtruth 911 around practitioner independence and asking what a business owes the public when its work supports emergency access. I want a sustainable living, fairly paid collaborators, and useful tools. I’m questioning what happens when profit becomes the purpose. - Author: Kaitlin Quinn I remember being six and hearing a parent scream to call 911. I also remember deciding not to. By that age, I had already had enough encounters with police and other first responders to have an understanding, in my six-year-old brain, of what calling could bring into our home. There was danger happening in front of me. I was weighing it against the possibility of inviting more. I believed that parent and I had a better chance of protecting ourselves without making the call. That is part of where my relationship with public safety begins. Long before I pursued dispatcher roles, worked in GIS, or started building tools for the people maintaining 911 data, I had questions about what happens when help arrives. I still do. I believe being able to reach help and be found during an emergency should be a human right. My experience also makes it difficult to treat access as the whole answer. What does safety mean to the person deciding whether to call? What have they already learned about the people who might come? Those questions follow me into my public health studies and into the company I’m building. Public health gives me a way to consider emergency access alongside the conditions people live in: their housing, work, income, and ability to get care. I want to understand safety across those conditions, including the moments when a system intended to protect someone becomes another risk they have to calculate. That is also where I keep running into money. There is the public promise of safety, and there is everything backstage that determines how that promise is carried out. Someone develops the software. Someone maintains the data. Someone decides what gets funded, what knowledge is accessible, and what the person doing the work will have to pay to understand it. I respect that work. I know highly skilled people in this field, and I know useful products take considerable effort to build. I also want to be able to ask what a business is being rewarded for, especially when its work supports essential public infrastructure. Is it helping people become more capable? What happens to the business when they do? I’m building Groundtruth 911 with those questions present from the beginning. They affect how I’ve constructed the business, the timeline I’m working on, and the financial pressures I’m willing to put it under. I have some room to make those decisions. I recognize that as a privilege. I’ve also made deliberate choices to preserve it, even if to my own detriment. In my own circumstances, founding a company has given me more room to speak candidly about the work than I felt I had when another company controlled my employment and health benefits. That freedom matters to me. So does the fact that people still doing the work inside organizations may have much more to lose by saying the same things. I want to use the independence I have to build something useful for them. The phrase I keep coming back to is “anti-profit.” I know what that sounds like coming from someone building a business. I want to earn a sustainable living. I want to pay future employees and collaborators fairly. I want enough money to maintain what we make, withstand difficult periods, and pursue the work that comes next. A business doing those things may generate profit. My objection is to profit becoming the overriding purpose, with usefulness and responsibility negotiated around it. “For-profit” and “nonprofit” don’t fully describe the question I’m asking. Groundtruth 911 is a business. Anti-profit is the name I’m trying out for a philosophy I’m still developing, not a claim about nonprofit status or a finished financial policy. My instinct is to put surplus back into the work and its usefulness. I want to examine what enough would look like for me, for the people working with me, and for the business itself. I don’t want the answer to automatically become more because more is available. That thinking shows up most clearly in what I want practitioners to be able to do without me. Groundtruth 911 is where I’m building tools to help GIS practitioners understand and check the geographic data used by 911 systems. Identifying an error is only part of the problem I want to address. The person looking at it needs to understand what it means, what to investigate next, and why that work matters downstream. Experts in the field who have seen my demonstrations have described the toolbox as revolutionary. I take that encouragement seriously. It also makes me want to keep asking why giving practitioners more access to their own work can feel like such a revelation. What are we paying for when we buy a tool? What expertise does it provide? What does it help us understand? Which parts remain difficult to access, and why? And, *why*? I want people to be able to carry the work forward themselves. If I have figured out a solution, I’m comfortable being financially and intellectually generous with it, including making tools or knowledge available for free where that makes sense. There are already other problems I want to work on. Helping someone get past this one gives us somewhere else to go. That is how I think about growth. I don’t need someone to remain stuck at the same point for my work to remain useful. I want relationships where we can keep learning from one another as the problems change. Anti-profit. Anti-prophet, too. I want to contribute expertise without making myself the entity everyone must keep coming back to for permission or understanding. The practitioners using these tools have knowledge I need. Their independence is part of what I’m trying to make possible. None of this settles every question about pricing, intellectual property, or how a company sustains itself. I still have to make those decisions. I also have to live with the pace of the choices I’m making. I believe I could be further along financially by now. I want the work to be recognized. I want it to support me. Choosing a different approach doesn’t make me immune to impatience. But I keep returning to what the business is for. My connection to 911 began before I had any understanding of the industry around it. At six, I was already trying to decide whether the promise of help applied to *me*. That question is still larger than any tool I could build. It belongs in how I decide what to build, who it serves, and what I ask them to depend on.