Collaboration has no limits
exactly a year ago
when india had reported its 100th covert
positive case
a user on reddit posted this to the
site’s r
india subreddit the anonymous user
described that they were preparing a
database on google sheets
to collect as much information as
possible regarding the transmission of
the coronavirus
in india i was mindlessly doomed
scrolling through my news feed
when i first discovered this post and
this one sentence really bothered me
doing this from the start of the
epidemic will be valuable data in the
future
what a weird way to spend time doing
quarantine right
but i opened the spreadsheet and it
looked fairly simple
100 of transmission data right from the
first reported case on january 30th
2020 to then present hundredth case
each row was tagged with the source
which was either a state bulletin
or a press release reporting on behalf
of medical institutions
since every transmission was recorded
adding up all the numbers gave an
up-to-date overview
of the number of people across four
different categories
confirmed with those who tested positive
active were those who were actively
carrying the virus
recovered with those who were immune to
the virus
and deceased were those who fought
really really hard
but unfortunately couldn’t make it
these calculations were automated and
stored in the second sheet
in the third sheet there was a breakdown
of these statistics
group by states and in the fourth sheet
there were instructions for newcomers to
enter new data
wait a minute so anybody on the internet
could potentially modify the contents of
the sheet
now i don’t know about you guys but this
is what i was expecting to happen to the
page in just a few hours
but i gave it a shot i read the
instructions
and there was a call for volunteers to
help with data entry
and at the bottom there was a link to
join a group chat
it was the weekend in the middle of a
worldwide quarantine
so i figured why not spare some time and
help with whatever this person was
trying to accomplish
so i hopped onto the group chat and very
quickly realized that
i wasn’t the only person who walked in
hoping to help
there were about 300 people already in
there
talking about all the different ways
each one of them could help
i noticed a pinned message at the top
summarizing the roadmap
and describing the kind of help required
to maintain this initiative for the next
coming days
i didn’t know anybody in the group and
i am pretty sure nobody knew each other
as well
but people just seemed to pick whatever
they could help with from the list
and branched out to smaller groups that
were focused on a single type of work
at that time these were data operations
and web development
in the data operations group people
volunteered to keep an eye on press
releases
from various sources and share them with
the group whenever there was an update
after verifying the source someone would
then document it on the sheet
a few others would then double check the
new entry to make sure they had gotten
it right
and the updates would then get published
similarly in the web development group
people volunteered to keep an eye on the
website source code
whenever people found bugs on the
website they would file issues
and describe what was acting weird after
figuring out a solution
someone would then update the code that
fixed the bug
a few others would then double check the
updated code to make sure they too had
gotten it right
and the changes would then be reflected
on the website
pretty straightforward right so when i
joined the kovan 19 outbreak was in its
early phase of the pandemic
the data operations group made about 10
updates every day
and i found that to be super
overwhelming the web development group
they were talking about fixing bugs and
adding new things to the website
so i dropped them a message saying hey
i could help with that over the weekend
the team came together and made a lot of
improvements to the code base
one of the things that we agreed to from
the very beginning
was to keep things as simple as possible
we knew that this was going to be a
collaborative crowdsourced effort
so we believe that using simpler tools
that a good majority of people already
knew
or perhaps could be learned easily would
make it a more inclusive space for
anybody to walk in and participate so
with this philosophy in mind
this was how the tech infrastructure
looked like
we stuck with google sheets and used it
as a primary database
anybody could easily create read
update and delete things off the
spreadsheet
yep we actually use google sheets as our
database
we redesigned the website on top of an
open source framework called react.js
that made it easier for people to create
and share interactive components without
worrying too much about how the rest of
the website worked
everyone from seasoned developers to
absolute beginners
created maps and graphs and were able to
easily plug them into the website
finally every 10 minutes a script took
snapshots of all the sheets
converted them into structured data and
published the data to this url
whenever anyone visited the website
it referred to the data present in this
url and populated the page with the
latest aggregated statistics
this helped to keep the project’s total
expenditure
to about zero rupees and allowed 300
volunteers to collaborate
without any friction in the process at
the start of the week we began to see
over 8000 people
visiting the website in just a single
day that’s
a lot of people and as much as we were
worried about scaling the tech
infrastructure
to support 300 volunteers none of us had
any previous experiences
with scaling reliability or
accountability
to the general public one trivial bug
and you could end up causing chaos at a
time when it’s crucial for
everybody to remain calm in
less than 24 hours six million people
were on the front page to keep up with
the numbers
that brought in a lot of questions on
social media like is this official
who are you guys how are you doing this
by the way
in no time a new bunch of incoming
volunteers
branched out to take care of social
media we created an account representing
the initiative
reached out to as many people as
possible and clarified with answers
since all the work done was transparent
in open source
it helped people vouch for their
credibility whenever we made mistakes
people were quick to correct us this
very quickly grew into a medium of
communications between the volunteers
and the general public they were able to
run multiple awareness campaigns
data analysis features in qa sessions
with experts
to bring a scientific and data-driven
approach to the situation
questions then turned into where can i
find a testing center in mother
what’s the curfew time in chennai i’d
like to volunteer how do i get started
social media can be incredibly volatile
when talking about a subject like
cover 19 which stands at the
intersection of health
data politics and all the emotional
uncertainties that was brought about by
the lockdown
however helplessness and vulnerability
to the crisis
drove a lot of these questions
withholding updates
only feared uncertainty fear
and even the spread of dangerous
misinformation
being transparent empathetic and
objective with their communications
significantly help people
be at ease soon many joined together
and kept us on our doors by tagging us
to press releases
and eventually many cheered us on to
keep the good work going
a couple of weeks in the energy was
still running high and many more still
joined the group
hoping to help these were some of the
things that were made possible
essentials help people find the nearest
testing
centers foot banks shelters
open supermarkets etc localization
people from different states came
together and translated the website into
these many regional languages
behind the scenes the group chat also
opened up conversations and
collaborations
between researchers journalists
economists and many more
while development had run its course and
had eventually started to ease down a
little
the real work had begun for the folks in
the data operations group
they were absolutely floored with the
rise in the number of people testing
positive
and fighting the virus to give you some
context
each of the 28 states and eight union
territories had separate channels of
communication
and reporting with varying degrees of
granularity
and structure even though the reporting
was half as hard
the team only had to record a handful of
cases to begin with
the months following may the team had
moved on from aggregating by states to
aggregating by districts
there are about 700 districts in india
and with four data points collected for
each
that’s about 2 800 data points collected
per day even though many districts and
states were unable to release all the
details
the data collected was still vast so
the team had to improvise on the fly by
re-evaluating their operations multiple
times
adapting to the changing nature of
primary sources and sometimes
even breaking the limits of google
sheets for instance
some of them even built custom big text
recognition scripts
to sift through multiple pdfs as they
came in and quickly turn them into
something they could make sense of
but at the end of the day regardless of
all the tech magic
and software gymnastics the final
entries were input by
volunteers in order to avoid any glaring
mistakes
it’s true that technology has made
collaborating with multiple people
easier than ever before however
computers don’t feel the heavy toll
it comes along with adding thousands of
rows to a spreadsheet
each roman there gave us a little
glimpse into the lives of thousands of
indians getting through this awful
pandemic
and given the grim nature of the
volunteers work
getting to some of the worst days wasn’t
easy
and i’m sure it wasn’t easy for you as
well
all of us entered a very painful period
in our country’s history
when over 50 000 people’s lives were at
stake
every day the economy was severely
tanking
people were losing their jobs and most
importantly
a lot of people were dying for some
they were friends and for some they were
family
we lost a lot of people along the way
and
that sucks but what surprises me the
most is that
people still showed up none of us in the
group had met each other before
and every interaction was online yet
there was the sense of familiarity
that brought us all together in the
midst of this very uneventful moment of
our lives
people checked in on each other across
different countries and time zones
and there existed this sense of empathy
care and selflessness things i
never would have thought this witness
happen over the spreadsheet
but it was there
row in there felt personal to each one
of us
at some point and that’s been the
invisible culture that has sustained
this initiative
for more than a year now today
marks one year since someone posted this
on the internet
hoping that doing this from the start of
this pandemic
would be valuable data in the future
throughout this journey
overnight in india.org has become a
significant source of information for
research
state governments and even the very
recently released
economic survey of india eventually
this initiative will have to stop which
is the goal
but until then we will continue to take
it
one day at a time over the last year
so many of you have helped us in so many
different ways
and we sincerely appreciate all the help
you’ve helped us believe
that collaboration has no limits