Quaranteam: A Meta-Analysis

I must say that the inaugural Quaranteam has been a resounding success. While I might have already mentioned that the Boston Polyamorous Community is an exceptional group of people who have a lot of practice at negotiating boundaries and being community-minded, we are also smart, creative, and a lot of fun!

Delightful things that have surprised me

Opening up a Boston Poly Community Quaranteam (BPC QT) Slack and cautiously nurturing and moderating it through its development has led to so many delightful things beyond Quaranteam’s original vision of Helpers helping Helpees with Captains to coordinate.

• Slack Members have created and moderated their own amazing channels, such as #surprise-squad, where BPC QT Members anonymously drop off surprises at each other’s houses (with privacy explicitly protected!).

• Countless group activities have been coordinated on the platform ranging from Zoom tea parties, to movie nights, to remote beer tastings (with curated beers delivered to the homes of all attendees!).

• The incredible Admin team has brought diverse strengths to building a culture of positivity in the Slack. Sometimes this is formal (e.g. authoring Slack Etiquette Guidelines), sometimes this is structural (e.g. engaging the community and taking the time to plan before launching new Slack channels), and sometimes this is active (keeping an eye on heated discussions and jumping in with a gentle hand when appropriate).
  
  

Bumps in the road

However, it’s not been all puppies and rainbows. Considering the safe environment and culture of sharing which we’ve built in the BPC QT Slack, growing pains can be hard and emotions can be huge (especially these days). Trust isn’t something that happens by accident, and new members can be scary. Keeping the Slack culture healthy and vibrant takes a lot of conscious work.

And beyond interpersonal considerations, other weird snags can come up. Did you know that McAfee briefly categorized quaranteam.net as a malicious website, scaring off new members?  Props again to the diverse skills set of our Admin team – we were able to petition McAfee to change their records and stop talking trash about us within a week. You know, if it was just me running Quaranteam, I would have had to fix this by abandoning quaranteam.net entirely and then moving everything over to a whole new website… having people who know things that I don’t in leadership positions sure is helpful!

Goals and ambitions going forward

While the BPC QT is a lively and rewarding handful that takes up plenty of time, the Quaranteam leadership team (the Admins plus a few allies) is always on the lookout for what’s next down the road. This has led to wonderful innovations (e.g. social justice Slack channels, oh and also *the entire Slack*), but we look beyond the BPC QT too. 

One recurring theme since day one has been figuring out how to build more Quaranteams for other already-established communities. Another has been how to give a professional boost to the Admins and other community members who are generously donating their time – this is a volunteer labor of love, and we’re all bringing our professional A-games to the table.

We’ve done several things to promote these dual objectives that many people might not know about:

• We launched a Quaranteam LinkedIn page. Take a look and consider following us!

• We’ve had some initial conversations with startup services companies. For example, we had two calls with KiwiTech about potentially co-developing a more robust software platform. We’re not partnering with them at this time, but discussing the QT vision and platform with them was incredibly constructive.

• Quaranteam applied to the Emergency Response for the General Public Innovation Challenge, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation last month. Check out our pitch deck! Here’s hoping we make it to round two!

• We’ve been strategizing about how to be written up in the press for several weeks now, and I think we’re about to hit traction with a local newspaper!

• Quaranteam is putting together application materials for the TechStars Startup Accelerator. Getting in would be an honor and an amazing experience and bring invaluable mentorship as well as funding opportunities. This is a pivot from our earlier ideas about registering as a 501(c)(3) or a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, but we’re still not selling user data and privacy will always be upheld as a core value.

Quaranteam has been a weird ride. It doesn’t look at all like I thought it would when I set out to build it four months ago – it’s so much better. To be honest, I had thought that Quaranteam would be petering out about now due to a robust public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but here we all still are. The Quaranteam structure that we’ve put in place will serve us well as we continue to brave this march together.