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