Human power can be extended by technologies. Imagine what it would have been like had we not had technology to allow us to communicate, do remote work, show care, and collaborate remotely.
In March of 2020 we launched the COVID-19 Technology Task Force, a group of volunteers collaborating, communicating, and applying our tech experience and our networks to help get useful things done. Ours was one of many self-organizing groups that formed during the Pandemic, all of them used technology to plan and take action to respond in ways that those who survived previous Pandemics could never have imagined. Imagine what life was like during the Black Death, when Europe lost 50% of its population in 6 years and most people lived in small and isolated communities. COVID-19 has challenged us in many ways, but remarkable things were done by volunteer groups, large and small, using technology to collaborate and organize actions that governments, companies, schools, institutions, national and local, were either too slow or failing to undertake.
We decided it would be useful to document what we learned about how to build an emergency, self-organizing effort when the Pandemic becomes more endemic. There are seven patterns we saw across these organizations. We include the interviews and open source documentation so others can improve upon what we learned.
The five AEROs we interviewed were: US Digital Response (USDR), C19 Coalition, Last Mile, The Commons Project and Covid Act Now Coalition. The AEROs formed in early 2020 and worked to mitigate the health, economic and social effects of lockdowns. They distributed 10 million masks and other PPE around the country, worked to get exposure notifications onto phones and other preventive technologies, built data dashboards, and raised millions of dollars in interest-free loans to help hospitals.
1. A common thread we saw across all the groups was a clear purpose. The purpose at the beginning is to organize to get PPE to frontline hospital workers. The focus remained constant for some over time and with success. Many successful organizations did one thing well and moved on. The lesson is to make it personal, get a community of like-minded people interested, and then get things done. The needs and defined lanes of action that the most impactful organizations found were unique to them. Joe Wilson said, "Go to where the fire is, and find the space where no one else is." Our founder put together an epidemiological model in a spreadsheet for himself and his friends and family, and then for anyone who wanted it. The spreadsheet became a website that served over 10 million people in the first weekend it was launched and that's when we pulled together an ad hoc team of volunteers and stood up a non-profit.
2. In 2022, a single shared communications platform is non-optional. It's important to know where the work will happen and stick to it. The technologies that people used to organize against COVID-19 were free, real-time, secure and usually singular in focus. Groups usually start with one person already using one of the many alternatives available. Pick a messaging app that allows for large groups, you don't want to have to change mid-stream.
The Last Mile was co-founded by several volunteers, including the one who opened the research lab in Wuhan. She was living in Brooklyn in February of 2020 and knew that there would be lockdowns. She said in the interview that there was community transmission in Hong Kong and the US, but that there was only 42 cases. When the US and Brooklyn were locked down in March of 2020 it was Tricia who knew where to start: simple, hyper-local and real-time tools to connect with neighbors. She wrote an op-ed about what the world could learn from Wuhan and included a link to a step-by-step toolkit on how to use apps like WhatsApp to create hyperlocal groups to serve those in need. Last Mile expanded beyond NYC as a mask distribution group to 11 cities and over 50 tribal nations, distributing over 12.2 million PPE directly to health care workers and others in dire need. The focus of mask distribution was shifted to standing up the COVID Straight Talk Lab to speed up policy change for labor unions and worker centers.
3. You need to build trust in the group, trust that you can get something done, and that what people are volunteering to do will help. There were different approaches to building trust.
A. The fastest and most obvious way to bootstrap is to tap people you already know and have worked with, as the core of the Covid Act Now Coalition had all worked together. It has natural limits but it is one of the best ways to start. If hospitals are central to what you are trying to do, you can find someone who can tap into a network of doctors, hospital workers, or first responders. It is remarkable how effective networks are in emergencies. New trusted networks and relationships form quickly when people want to help. Many of the early Covid Act Now Coalition team were friends from working at other companies.
A. Search for super connectors. People with networks and crazy human genes are called super connectors. It's easy to find the super connectors in the area you need to connect to. Ask people in the network who can help you remember the names that come up most often. You can find and follow a few roads. We met weekly to discuss the critical path follow-ups for each week. We were able to go farther faster because of the divided follow-up among the team.
A. The C19 Coalition developed a commitment model and theUSDR had a volunteer oath. The three broad commitments to action were supply of medical-grade PPE, a financing model to enable the PPE and an agreement to share data around it. You can see the commitments company by company here after they asked corporate partners to publicly commit to goals. C19 Coalition and its partners delivered 1 billion PPE units.
The tech industry wanted to just write code, and I needed organizers, so I focused on the communities and the real people. A doctor in a private practice on the Upper East Side piped up in the chat group and said: "I'll go right now." The Last Mile's bottom-up group led the New Yorker to cover the group's operations from their supply-chain delivery logistics database that they spun up in 24 hours.
Emergency task forces sometimes call for people first, product second, when it comes to tech and tech products. If you work in tech and you want to build a product, it can be a misdirection. AEROs start with people and their needs and focus on off-the-shelf solutions. As they understand the requirements that can't be met with existing tech, AEROs build high-value, high-impact, well-aimed products. The guides that Last Mile's Straight Talk Lab developed are functional, simple and useful. The Connect and Protect PSAs were designed based on the data from the hardest hit communities. The focus should be on immediately solving your audience's problem, and identifying what's most important to solve it, before pouring resources into improving your solution with custom tech.
5. You can build in the open. Many of the processes to run task forces are borrowed from the open source community. The radical transparency of AEROs empower people because decisions, transactions are visible and accessible for anyone to see. Many groups have no formal organization and are often dependent on the key issue at hand. There is no single point of failure. They use open source tools, run standups and create playbooks to share their learnings. They think of systems and tools as Lego-like blocks to build, test and share if they work, as Joe Wilson said.
6. Part-time commitment from people with day jobs is how AEROs start. Don't expect full-timers. It is a good term for instigators to be used for leaders. AEROs are flexible and flat, and they find what works. It is a culture similar to early-stage tech, as Jessica Cole fromUSDR puts it.
7. Say thank you. People start and build AEROs because they want to help. Setting goals and saying thank-you are equally important.
Humans are very Adaptivist. The world was turned upside down in a matter of weeks. Our economies, our capitalist infrastructures, our governments, and the rest of the systems we have created to support our society are not designed for rapid adaptation because they are designed for production, efficiency and scale. Not resilience, flexibility or fast adaptation. New organizational forms are needed to address specific needs as the world is becoming more variable and unpredictable. A growing trend is where people self organize to create collective good in places where our existing institutions are leaving big gaps. Grassroots, bottoms-up systems of collaboration can be powerful engines of action, but don't need to be permanent. Many AEROs require zero funding, but with the right tools, methods and processes they can affect real change in local communities at a speed that companies, governments, and militaries cannot.
Europe is at war and facing a massive refugee crisis. In the last few weeks, 3 million people have left their homes in Ukraine. This will be the largest movement of displaced people in Europe in a century.
Small groups of people can solve real world problems in real time with the help of the internet. The culture of the Internet is in which tech is evolved and adapted through feedback loops and collaboration in small and large ways. Technology is further adapted in innovative ways to help address immediate, critical needs with each new emergency.
Our hope is that this is a living document and that we can use it to create emergency response organizations. Thank you for reading and for sharing your experience. While we are thanking everyone who participated in documenting this, we also want to thank the thousands of people who gathered in small groups and helped millions of people. Special thanks to Jessica Cole at US Digital Response, Joe Wilson at the C19 Coalition, and Paul Meyer at The Commons Project. The COVID Tech Task Force would like to thank everyone who worked with them.
There are edited versions of the video interviews that contributed to this guide.
Hack around systems and governments, help by organizing.
Right now, groups are forming.
UkraineDAO has raised more than $3 million and will go to Come Back Alive.
We now have around 30 TechfugeesWhatsApp groups with between 50 and 150 members.
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