In this bright year 2025, the digital landscape resembles nothing so much as ancient Rome—magnificent, crowded, and utterly resistant to architectural innovation. Platform loyalties are settled with the finality of religious conversion. Another app? Meh ... Save your breath and development time -- nobody cares; nobody wants to go back to 2010.

Our project operates on a principle the military discovered millennia ago: INTELLIGENCE wins wars, not the nice ass or app that's ridden into battle. We're building an API-first cognitive framework using Rust—because when information is ammunition, we don't tolerate delays, misfires or insecure information. Our implementation slashes latency to by orders of magnitude because in intelligence work, yesterday's data or something you wanted work on fifteen minutes ago is as useful as yesterday's weather report.

Some say that the human brain didn't evolve to process exabytes, but the fundamental failing in really revolutionizing the design of AI assistants and user interface latency has been treating humans as passengers on goat trains rather than pilots that fight. Our free, open source extensible system creates a true symbiosis—the machine processes data at machine speeds while the human makes decisions at human levels. The Tauri/Rust/Svelte interface, forked from GitButler and tweaked slightly for our use cases, branches like evolutionary paths because the universe doesn't offer single solutions—it offers spectrums of diverse possibilities.

A citizen that works with their options to create something unique is FREE; a passive customer with convenient choices fed by a recommendation engine is being herded and groomed for harvest. The difference matters to those who prefer to die fighting like General Nathaniel Lyon, the namesake of Lyon County, rather than grovel on their knees accepting what is offered.

The Rock Rapids community applications ecosystem consists of eight interconnected web applications, each addressing specific aspects of community life:

• Rockrapids.INFO: The central hub and top-level gateway to all Rock Rapids applications
• Rockrapids.ART: Information about arts, crafts, creative endeavors that showcases Rock Rapids citizens.
• Rockrapids.FUN: Highlighting recreational activities and entertainment options, especially in Rock Rapids.
• Rockrapids.GUIDE: City, school, daycare, church, sheriff, highway patrol, road condition, EMT/Fire and public service guideance
• Rockrapids.SHOP: Featuring retail promotions and shopping events of Rock Rapids merchants/vendors.
• Rockrapids.STORE: Listing marketplace items and products for sale that showcase locally available items.
• Rockrapids.WORK: Connecting people with employment opportunities
• Rockrapids.XYZ: Coordinating volunteer activities and recognition

Our API-first, low-latency approach focuses on three core principles:

1. Ditch any sense of entitlement: We don't expect users to change their media preferences; instead we prioritize reliable, utilitarian tools that better present choices
2. Connect dots; let users fill gaps: We use AI to integrate significant more sources of information and choose lower-latency technologies to better present comparable choices
3. Develop the Developers: The project is about developing the developers who will dogfood simple, EXTENSIBLE open source solutions that can readily maintain and improved

Our architecture will continue to be selected for its maintainability, performance, and alignment with developing and growing the skill sets available in our community of high-agency volunteers.

If you're interested in adapting this ecosystem for your own community:

1. Feel free to fork this repository
2. Customize the applications to meet your community's specific needs
3. Consider the maintenance requirements and ensure you have local volunteers who can sustain the system
4. We recommend preserving the design philosophy of simplicity and maintainability

This project is designed to be built and maintained by volunteers from the Rock Rapids community. If you're a resident of Rock Rapids or the surrounding area and would like to contribute, please:

1. Review our Contributing Guidelines
2. Familiarize yourself with our Code of Conduct
3. READ the content in this guide; work through the development plan; improve it autodidactically.

We value local participation to ensure our applications truly serve the specific needs of Rock Rapids.

This project is in active development. See the Issues page for current work items and the Projects page for our roadmap.

Project Coordinator: Mark Bruns - MarkBruns@MarkBruns.com

For general inquiries, please attend one of our monthly community meetings (details on RockRapids.INFO).