Brightly Wired: a community platform for neurodiverse Kiwis

The brief

Brightly Wired is a community platform for neurodiverse New Zealanders and the families who love them.

Why this exists

Brightly Wired is my brain child. The reason it has come around is that I really wanted this type of site when my son was diagnosed in Kindy. Picture a new mum being called into Kindy and advised, not very well, that her son was naughty and a bully. This for any parent would be hard to hear; for me it was incredibly hard to hear. I knew, had seen the signs that my son was neurodivergent. I knew he was not naughty, was not a bully, he was just not understood, and the teachers labelled him. Picture now the next several years of struggle for that mother and family: the diagnosis, the fights with the school to get it recognised, the inability of teachers and staff to see what was going on. I needed support, and not just the support of my family but the support of others going through the same thing. I needed a place that I could go to to find resources. I needed a place that I felt I belonged. This is the reason that Brightly Wired was born. I never want another mother, child or an adult to go through what I did.

The mission

The rules that guide every design decision:

• Accessibility-first. Every feature passes WCAG 2.2 AA before it ships. No exceptions.
• Plain language. No clinical jargon unless explicitly framed as such. The audience includes 14-year-olds and exhausted parents.
• Honesty about state. No documentation claims a feature is production-ready when it isn’t.
• Community before product. When a feature decision and a community-safety decision conflict, community wins.

What Brightly Wired deliberately is NOT:

• Not a clinical service. No diagnoses, no therapy, no medical advice. We point at services; we don’t replace them.
• Not a global platform. Aotearoa-first, because that’s where the gap is.
• Not advertising-driven. The community comes first; trust is the product.
• Not gatekept by diagnosis. Self-identification is welcomed.

Brightly Wired is community-driven and focused. I am not a doctor. I am a mother of two neurodivergent children, and a late-diagnosed adult. That is not a disclaimer. That is the whole point.

Software for people who think differently, built by someone who thinks differently.

Where I am at

It has not been deployed. It is currently being restructured. When it was originally built it was built with Lovable, however when I looked at the backend, one, I had no clue what I was looking at, and two, I realised I wanted to build this site myself. So I talked with my husband and my family and the decision was made that I would start at Dev Academy and learn development, never realising how I would actually love it.

The rebuild is doc-led. Before I touch code again, I audited the whole Lovable scaffold and committed a full planning doc set: a North Star, an honest audit of what worked and what didn’t, a keep-vs-gut ledger, a phased roadmap from Phase 0 through Phase 8+, tech stack decisions, schema, and the open questions I have deliberately deferred.

It is currently in the rework stage. I just had Claude Code go through it and do a breakdown of what the files look like: what I should keep, what should be dumped, what looks really good. So that I can create the plan to rebuild the site. This is the stage I am at now: the planning stage.

What’s next

I will be refining the setup, the docs, and the rebuild plan itself. The pace will be a bit slower from here as I start Dev Academy’s AI Launchpad on 27 July. The rough timeline for Brightly Wired is to have it deployed in a six-month period. That could also be pushed out to eighteen months depending on what my next couple of months look like.