Frank Lloyd Wright coined the term organic architecture:

Organic Architecture is an architecture from within outward, in which entity is an ideal … Organic means, in the philosophic sense, entity. Where the whole is [to] the part as the part is to the whole and where the nature of the materials, the nature of the purpose, the nature of the entire performance becomes a necessity.

From within outward: Wright's organic principle can be practiced in web development by implementing systems that handle both an organization’s internal processes and its public information. (Coding culture itself has the similar albeit more drily-put value of DRY — Don’t Repeat Yourself.) Mr Wright again:

We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other.

Artifacts as public-facing content

Such organic web development continues to pay dividends for Christian Schools of Florida. CSF's leading activity is School Accreditation, which consequently is the first menu item at csfla.org, linking to CSF’s exhaustive public-facing Accreditation Standards page.

Accreditation standards appear here as a single document but are in fact discrete items in the system. Such first-class existence enables each standard to be related to other types of system items. Recently they got a new relationship: to artifacts.

Thanks to that new relationship, on the public page each standard is now followed by a list of its required artifacts.

Artifacts as file repository for members

There is a deeper use for artifacts. During the all-important School Accreditation process, an appointed peer review team pays an on-site visit to the school that's applying for re-accreditation. The team must also receive evidentiary documentation from the school. Obviously, the more documentation available beforehand for the peer review team, the briefer and less disruptive is the on-site visit.

But how to best share and access documents? To be sure there are generalized online file repository services such as Dropbox or Google Drive, and some schools have their own internal repositories (though most don’t). With our new artifacts, we went one or two better. We added two new content channels:

• Artifact Slots, a type of artifact, each entry relating to one or more Accreditation Standards (as used in the public-facing accreditation page)
• Artifact Items, an individual artifact, each entry relating to an Artifact Slot and to a School, with a field each for file upload, URL and text

Now a school being reviewed can upload, for example, its Curriculum Guide file to a new Artifact Items entry that relates to the Curriculum Guide entry in Artifacts Slots (and also gets related to that school by dint of being uploaded by someone at that school). A link to this artifact then appears for the peer review team members when dealing with an accreditation standard that demands the Curriculum Guide as an evidentiary artifact.

Recall DRY; each artifact need only be uploaded one time, and once in the system it appears wherever needed. People can work asynchronously, the school staff uploading documents at their convenience, the peer review team members reviewing them at theirs. Precious on-site visit time can be dedicated to activities that demand it, such as visual inspections of premises and in-person discussions of documents already reviewed.

Poised for growth

Texting from a conference a few days ago, CSF Executive Director Dana James exclaimed to Director of Accreditation Susan Taylor:

We are so ahead of everyone. I’m thankful for your hard work and Ken [Wackes]’s vision. … Honestly, [the system]’s better than ever.

When a computer system is architected organically — all its content comprised of well-structured items — things can be woven together in surprising new ways whenever a need or benefit is articulated. Indeed, this is one aspect of organic architecture that Mr Wright doesn't emphasize, perhaps because it pertains less to buildings than to organizations and the systems that model them. Namely, being poised to grow.