Quaranteam - Giving Community Structure to Run Wild

Quaranteam continues to grow and expand!  We’re getting better and better at this as time passes. 

The most notable recent change was the rollout of a Slack workspace.  I’m a closet luddite, and I’ve been resistant to adopting Slack in my life generally.  I don’t really social media, and I prefer using the internet to research information rather than to socialize with friends.  But my two amazing co-admins convinced me it was worth exploring. 

They were right - It has been mind-blowingly successful at building community engagement.

Quaranteam’s core offering is basically a matching service with a project management component.  You fill out a form to become a Helper, and then potentially get matched with a Helpee.  In the meantime, there’s not much to do.  And people who join the platform but who don’t feel up to being a Helper at this point never really get contacted at all, beyond a weekly newsletter. 

Having the Slack as a parallel product offering gives all members a place to go.  Whether or not they actively post messages or participate, they can go in there and see their friends and friends of friends discussing which stores have toilet paper, learning how to care for a yeast starter, sharing pet photos, and exchanging friend codes for Animal Crossing (for example).  We ended up building a few topic-specific channels, but mostly we’re just letting the Slack run wild.  And it is J

The Slack also supports the core offering.  Whenever a new Helpee signs on for two weeks of support, we build them a private Slack channel.  The Captain is then able to invite the whole Helper Squad to one centralized place to coordinate.  The Helpee doesn’t have to do Slack if they don’t want to, but they’re included in the room and encouraged to invite their friends who might not have been signed up to be “official” Helpers.  This has an added bonus of helping to protect the privacy of everyone involved, because no email addresses need to be shared.

All of this said, not everybody is into Slack.  Some Helpers will still need to be wrangled by email, and other Captains and Helpees might prefer to communicate by text message outside of the channel.

This is fine.  Our goal is to create a framework and make tools available.  There’s no need to be proscriptive about how Helpees are helped.  I hope that more Helpees start nominating their own Captains, and I want to make sure the trusted friend or partner who they nominate is able to tap into the Quaranteam machine and benefit from what we’ve built and what we’ve learned.

Quaranteam - Prioritizing Community

The trick with growing a platform like Quaranteam isn’t the technology.  The trick is the community.  Getting people to show up, getting people to engage, getting people to bring their own ideas and imaginations to a shared vision.

I had my own startup back in 2011.  Pico Health.  Health insurance for entrepreneurs and startups back before several of the ACA provisions had rolled out.  My home state of Massachusetts was unusual in that we had an individual mandate as well as a community-rated health insurance exchange for individuals and small businesses.  Pico Health limped along for a while.  I learned a lot, made some friends, and earned maybe $500.  In my post-mortem ruminations about what I could have done better, the number one thing that comes to mind is that I didn’t have a cofounder.  I was doing everything alone.

Before I launched anything with Quaranteam, I read up on how to build a successful community.  I had previously studied community building in 2014 while managing a team of remote contractors at a different startup, and I continued my community-building education while earning my MPH. 

I am delighted to say that, with just a little bit of prioritizing and effort, my smart, talented friends quickly became keys and authors to Quaranteam’s success.  By reaching out to awesome people individually and then working to develop a platform for them to communicate with each other and collaborate without me, Quaranteam is growing beyond my imagination already.  Plus, if you ask individuals for specific help but they’re not able to help, they often then become more engaged individual community members – they feel valued and like they’re a part of something.  Engaged community members are treasures and grow into the roots of any organization or movement.

Quaranteam - Three Forms to Get Started

At its core, Quaranteam is a collection of three Google Forms.

-       Helper Sign-up

-       Helpee Sign-up

-       Join the community Quaranteam

The most important one, in my opinion, is the Helper Sign-Up form.  This is where people can put their names down and think of concrete ways that they might be able to help someone trapped at home in all this mess. This gives people a place to opt-in and write their name down and, even if they’re just filling out a form online, this takes some of the emotional load off of them about what they could be doing to help out during the pandemic.

In the three weeks since launching, there have been some lessons learned.  For example, people’s Helper survey responses get stale fast.  People are signing up, but then taking their families and moving to the country to wait this out.  They might have been willing to do grocery runs when they first signed up, but have since decided that that’s now outside of their risk tolerance.  The Quaranteam Admins have been dedicating a lot of effort to this problem over the past week, and we’re currently experimenting with using a Slack channel.

The Helpee Sign-Up form is a place where people can request community support and services.  This one triggers an immediate email to the Admins so we can start setting them up to get help right away.  The first step is assigning a Captain (ideally, someone who already has a relationship with the Helpee) who will then set up structure to coordinate Helpers and act like a project manager.

One lesson learned so far is that here is where the vision statement matters.  It needs to be clear who this Quaranteam community is, and what we’re offering.  The current vision statement is:

To provide human support to members of the extended Boston Poly Community should they need to self-quarantine or isolate due to COVID-19 virus

Ambiguity can creep in here – I’m an MPH and use the terms self-isolation and self-quarantine precisely (you’re actually sick and don’t want to spread it, or you’ve been in contact with someone known to be sick and you might be contagious but not showing symptoms yet).  However, these terms are getting thrown around a lot lately, and people are commonly using them to include social distancing and/or hunkering down with your household and not going outside (whether or not you’re sick or have been exposed to anything).  Also, something gets lost in the stuffy language of this statement – it’s not crystal clear that this is a platform to ask your friends for help.  If you’re new to the platform, this might look like a business or a social services agency or something.

And last – there’s a Google Form for new members to sign up.  A bunch of thought was put into this one.  The only information we truly need is an email address associated with a Google account so we can manually grant access to the full community Quaranteam site.  We ask for name, but don’t require a real one to sign up just as a Member (the number of pseudonyms used in the extended Boston Poly Community is staggering). 

We also ask how you heard about the site.  There was a lot of discussion put into this question and how rigid to make it.  We’ve built privacy protections into workflows to avoid disclosing to an evil ex that a Helpee is stuck at home (for example).  There is no intention to police the member list, but the admins won’t personally know everybody who joins.  So far, this question has already borne fruit.  When people I didn’t know personally signed up to be Helpees, I knew how to find the right Captains and potential Helpers as a result of who sent them.  Plus, if anything ever goes wrong, I want to be able to follow bread crumbs back to where this person came from and figure out who knows them.

If I had the web development chops, I’d replace this with a more traditional log-in/sign-up workflow into a site that maybe wasn’t a Google Site requiring Google credentials.  Soon.

In this post, I shared a lot of content about how Quaranteam is built.  If you are interested in building one for your own closed community, please shoot me an email at admin@quaranteam.net.  Let’s brainstorm building this together, and your community can have a link on the the main quaranteam.net page. 

Quaranteam - Chronicling the Development of an Idea

On Thursday, March 12, I woke up with an idea.  Coronavirus was beginning to spread in Boston, along with an uptick in fear and anxiety.  The schools hadn’t been closed yet, but events were getting cancelled, social gatherings were turning to virtual, and entire households in my community were hunkering down and all but barricading their doors.

COVID-19 is scary and its mortality rates are sobering.  But most of us will still be here next year.  Human costs take the form of more than just lives lost. 

I belong to a wonderful local community.  Boston has a vast and diverse population of polyamorous people.  The tapestry of community which grows and becomes enriched through consensual non-monogamy is awe-inspiring.  In my experience, Boston poly folk are community-minded, imaginative, and compassionate.  And part of the beauty and richness is that the community expands beyond my knowledge and connections and fades into the unknown – it’s delightful when I get to meet new friends I didn’t know I had yet.

The idea I woke up with was to figure out a way to enable different local poly folk to connect and give support to anyone else in the community who needed to self-isolate (due to illness) or self-quarantine (due to exposure) because of coronavirus.  I saw the nervous energy practically sparking off the screen in social media and group chats.  Everyone wanted to help – wanted to do something.  The incoherent and chaotic messaging coming from our country’s leaders only lead to more fear, more anxiety.  There was no one best place to throw money, labor, and effort to fight the pandemic.  I wanted to create a way for my friends to channel this energy into something good, concrete, and helpful. 

After a week of conferring with people and brainstorming, Quaranteam was born.  This platform (built on Google Sites to launch a minimum viable product quickly), is a way for people to sign up to be Helpers, and know that they will be called upon to help if their friends or friends of friends are trapped in their houses.  And, should anyone catch or be exposed to COVID-19 or have another temporary health condition complicated by all of society shutting down, they can fill out a quick survey and become a Helpee. 

There are a lot of sites like this.  The week leading up to Quaranteam’s launch saw several efforts at using the internet to connect help with the people who needed it.  Several websites cropped up where you could sign up to be a Helper or Helpee (using Quaranteam’s terminiology), but so many of these were just lists. 

Quaranteam differentiates itself from these in two ways:

1.     It is a closed, local community

2.     Captains

There are probably thousands of people who qualify as members of the extended Boston poly community, but it’s still restricted.  This means that people are helping their friends and friends of friends, and we’re building good social juju in the process, partially making up for all of the cancelled parties.  This also helps protect privacy, a big deal for several of the parents and professionals in our community who don’t want to be “outed” by being seen asking for help on this platform.  An insular community design like this would work in many contexts – a church congregation might want to pull together in this situation, but that wouldn’t mean that it’s a good idea to them spread their help thin across all churches everywhere.

Captains are the community members who bring the Helpers and Helpees together.  They work with Helpees to figure out what kind of support they need (a grocery run? virtual company while watching Netflix?) and recruit Helpers to deliver.  If a Helpee is really sick and having trouble, the Captain is also a single point of contact – a Helpee can request a toilet paper delivery without having to wrangle their Helpers themselves.­

Quaranteam has been growing at an amazing clip  and, like any startup, there are pivots and surprises almost daily.  Hold on to your butts!