Month 2 - Corona Mania
Hello all,
I’m very sorry for the delay in writing. It’s been 4 weeks since my last email, but things got reasonably manic for a while. Let me elaborate.
OnDeck
OnDeck is the program I mentioned in my last email. It’s a network for talented people in tech working on their next thing. It was meant to take place in San Francisco but when the travel bans started to pick up they decided to do it remotely. It kicked off on March 8th with a Zoom-powered on-boarding, which was surprisingly effective. Zoom’s breakout room feature works super well with large groups, and the team did a good job at structuring the activities to make sure people got to know each other.
Honestly, before the program kicked off I was a little skeptical as it was new and I couldn’t find many first-hand reviews. It’s still early, but signs so far are positive. Early thoughts on some markers:
Quality of network: Super high. There’s a slack channel where people introduce themselves and talk about what they’ve done and what they’re interested in. I read most of them and I can’t recall a bio that I didn’t react somewhere between “Wow, that’s super impressive” and “I think I’d enjoy drinks with this person“.
Organization & Facilitation: A+. This isn’t just “throw people into a slack room and let them connect.” There’s a sizeable team of people working behind the scenes to ensure people are getting the most out of the program. From what I can tell, the team themselves are as interesting and talented as the participants.
Participation: This is the most difficult part of any program like OnDeck, made more difficult by it being forced-online due to COVID-19. My impression is there’s still a notable split between those who are really all-in and those who engage passively. Right now I’d place myself in the second category - the timezone difference and the multiple other projects (see below) have made it difficult to get fully involved. Although I do plan on improving this in the next couple of weeks.
COVID-19 Projects
I’ll admit, I lost myself a little in the past 4 weeks down the Coronavirus rabbit hole. A well-curated twitter feed again proved an incredible source of information, but there was a period where I wandered from informed-and-cautious to obsessive territory. I ended up probably about 2 weeks ahead of the news cycle, which in Corona days is a long time, and the apathy from my social circles, rather than pull me back to reality, served to heighten my anxiety. It was a big communication lesson for me — if you want to be heard, you have to meet people where they are, be patient, and explain, not tell.
When the lockdown was announced, I decided to stay in Manila. I reasoned that my chance of personal harm would be roughly the same here as at home, but Faith is here and with all the travel bans happening, there was no guarantee when we might see each other again if I left. That being said, watching your compatriots flee while you remain away from home during a pandemic, it’s tough not to feel a sense of uneasiness and question whether you’re making the right decision.
I was, and still am, quite concerned about what a disease like COVID-19 might do to a country like the Philippines, with a much weaker health system, and much higher population density than other countries that are getting pummelled. So I got in touch with a friend who had previously worked with Francis Duque, the current Secretary of Health. She was quite candid in sharing the current state of play, and whilst much of what she told me didn’t exactly inspire confidence in the government’s preparedness, just having more first-hand information eased my anxiety.
At that point, I decided to pause what I was working on and try to help out wherever I could. To be honest, this was as much an effort in reducing my feeling of helplessness as it was noble. I teamed up with another Irish friend, Orna, who has been here since the Typhoon Yolanda response and had worked with the UN, ADB and the Philippines DOH. Orna is much better connected in government, and after a few more calls we found ourselves overseeing the platform to find and allocate additional medical staff to the front line hospitals. It was inspiring speaking over Zoom to the Directors of these hospitals, some of whom were on quarantine. We decided not to build any custom software - we span up a Wix website, an Airtable with Twilio integration, and took HR, Payroll and Disbursement tools off the shelf. Huge thanks are due here to Airtable, who gave us one year of their Pro plan for free, Sprout who offered their HR and Payroll system, Paymaya, who offered to take care of payouts, and Karla Mesina, who was an enormous help on the legal side. The website itself drew controversy as the DOH had only authorised 500 pesos per day for these workers, but thankfully the press seems to have forced them to reconsider. The first batch of workers will be allocated this week.
Now that we’ve kicked that project off, myself, Orna, and a few other friends are brainstorming other ways we can help. I’ve been encouraged by the seeming openness of the DOH to outside assistance in theory, but somewhat disheartened by the difficulty in making that happen in practice — people are just so overburdened so it can be days before you get a response. We’ll keep plugging away.
Project Bua
During the same period, in addition to the Philippines work I found myself involved with an Irish group working on a public-facing mobile application for contact tracing. My impression is that contact tracing and mass testing are the most promising routes back to normality post-lockdown, so they seem like very high-impact things to work on. Myself and James were introduced to a small team, with a super strong lead, Lydia, who’d built a prototype and were working on HSE approval. We roped in a few friends to help, and we put our heads down.
There are quite a few ways to do contact tracing, and we were reasonably opinionated with ours. My impression was that the people making the decision in government about which direction to take were not super clear on what they could and couldn’t do from a privacy perspective, and they were looking to other countries for guidance. At that point the only country that had publicly launched was Singapore, with Tracetogether, so this was the model the HSE was looking to replicate. Tracetogether’s solution is very privacy friendly, but excludes non-smartphone-users from the social graph, prevents real-time analysis to identify high risk clusters and spot patterns, and doesn’t add value to healthcare workers, who need to see a list of people and places someone has been in contact with, in order to assess their risk profile. Our solution combined active (manual logging) and passive (background GPS) tracing, allowed to backfill data from other places into a central store, and was GDPR-compliant.
That period culminated with a giant Zoom call with several of the private groups that were working on solutions. To be honest the communication from the HSE was quite bad, and the requirements-gathering and decision-making processes were very opaque. I think many on the call were confused as to what the purpose was and how the HSE wanted the teams to proceed. In the end we got word that they’d gone with an app developed by a team at Nearform. This at least was promising, as I’ve heard that team is strong. I’ve seen news reports that the app is planned to launch in the next 2 weeks, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they put out. It’s too early to know which approach will work best, but I’m super interested to see whether other countries will take a different approach, or if everyone will follow the Singapore model.
After we got that message, most on the team went back to what they were previously working on, but Lydia and a few others are continuing their work, the plan being to open source the code for other countries that might want to use it.
A huge thanks is due here to Brian McKiernan and Aislinn Kelly, who jumped in at a moment’s notice to help with product & design, and added a ton of value during the time they were involved.
Editmode
Ok, finally, back to Editmode. I said in my last email that I wanted to have it launched by April 5, and I’ve decided to stick to that. As of yesterday evening, it’s finally at a place that I’m happy to share it with others. I’ve finished the interactive demo, the walkthrough video, and the landing page, which you can see below. I’ve read that the best time to launch on ProductHunt is Sunday night, so my current plan is to circulate the current site to people I know in the coming week, take feedback and make tweaks, and then launch to the public on Sunday. I would very much appreciate any and all feedback that you might have - my key question for both non-technical and technical users is whether it’s clear what the product does from the homepage. So please have a gander and hit the reply button with your thoughts.
Stay safe everyone! And stay inside!
Tony