🔄 Can You Recall the Most Profound Virtual Connection You Made Over the Past Year?
🔄 Can You Recall the Most Profound Virtual Connection You Made Over the Past Year?
This month marks the one year anniversary of our U.S. quarantine.
Today, we’re kicking off the New_ Public phone stories, an audio archive dedicated to better understanding our digital public lives.
We want your stories! Call (646) 653-3937 and answer this prompt: Recall the most profound connection you made virtually over the past year. Describe the experience, the people, and the feeling you had. What made it meaningful to you?
Calls will be preserved alongside the rich ethnographic stories we collected through our Terra Incognita ethnography project that focuses on how communities shifted online in the pandemic. Help us enhance the time capsule with audio that will remind us of our collective hopes and fears during this time. Thanks in advance for sharing your story, and don’t worry if you’re not from NYC — we want to hear from everyone!
When Mutual Aid Moves Online
“How can we create an environment that is safe, and people have the same values, but that we're actually cultivating principles of social interdependence, shared stewardship, and restoring a local community relationship?”-Heidi Boisvert, new media artist, technologist, and founder of futurePerfect lab.
In recent weeks, Texas mutual aid organizations have proven that they are a critical part of the state’s disaster relief infrastructure. Mutual Aid Houston, a coalition of Houstonians who formed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, have raised and distributed almost $200,000 in payments to individuals in need of money for food, water, and supplies after the storm. And over the last year, we have witnessed that time and time again, well-meaning individuals with tech backgrounds can create new tools in the form of pages, databases, and apps to step in to provide timely information, services, and care when local government’s inaction renders communities helpless and accessible government aid is nowhere in sight.
Over the last year, we have seen the very notion of mutual aid, a voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit, get translated into tech — from software engineering and hackathons, to commercial apps broadening in scope and reconsidering issues of usership and privacy.
This month marks the one year anniversary of our U.S. quarantine. Mutual aid efforts have become increasingly popular because of social media and donation platforms like GoFundMe, Venmo, and PayPal but as these movements continue to grow and service more communities, we are seeing the varied ways the technologies fall short, either by their design or by how time consuming it is for individuals to manage so many streams of information and applications at once. This week, we spent some time listening to an organizer, a software engineer, a designer, and a technologist each to understand how future community-centered platforms should be built. What does the future of mutual aid online look like?
Tammy Chang, one of the founding members of Mutual Aid Houston, has been working 16 hour days to service local communities during the winter freeze because eight out of the nine organizers from MAH either had no power, no water, or no signal. The organization had to revert to SMS text to communicate with each other. The small team has been agile all year, responding to the needs of the pandemic, the movement against police brutality, tropical storms in Houston, the city’s eviction crisis, and now the Texas blackout all on a voluntary, no pay basis.
Since the winter freeze, MAH has been providing $100 each in direct cash assistance to people who need immediate food, water, or other services and who can’t wait for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or renter’s relief. The organization uses a combination of applications, from social media, communication platforms like Slack and GroupMe, to mobile payment services. They have found that there is an income/class/race distinction between Venmo and Cash App. A philanthropic public tends to donate with Venmo, while those requesting assistance tend to use Cash App.
Chang says that MAH received a high volume of donations but that Cashapp limited their distribution reach. A number of mutual aid organizations asked these mobile payment companies to raise their limits on how much you can spend a day, so they changed their limitations in a matter of days. But such a tech hiccup temporarily constrained MAH from serving the neediest in their community at the moment they most needed the help. Another challenge for the organization has been in providing resources in Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, and Vietnamese. Chang, who is of Chinese and Taiwanese descent, says they know how powerful it would be to be able to serve people like their grandparents. “In terms of technology that I would like to see in the future — Google Translate is good for very like small things — but in terms of accurately doing justice to people and their language, there needs to be another form of translation,” they said.
Since MAH is mostly a digital space that uses digital forms, they know they are only able to serve people with Internet access, or what Chang describes as “Internet literacy” to fill out the forms and get this information. They work to reach certain communities through paper forms and canvassing neighborhoods. And they ask minimal questions—you don’t need an ID or passport or home address — to keep their direct aid distribution accessible to as many people as possible.
“As an organization, our biggest hope is that mutual aid won't have to exist. We fill in the gaps where our government hasn't reached,” says Chang.
Tina Nguyen is a digital designer and researcher for NavaPBC, a digital consultant agency that works with government agencies to set up digital services like healthcare.gov. The agency focuses on improving government services to make them more accessible to marginalized communities. Nguyen is focused on projects related to unemployment. Working with a state unemployment agency, she is trying to change their design and operations process, encourage them to use usability research, and think of accessibility concerns. She says, “Right now, we're trying to do user research for the first time for a project that would normally have been launched without it.”
To rework a government agency’s digital workflow, created over the course of months, sometimes years, is no small feat. Nguyen and team need to graciously encourage their clients to be iterative and test small things along the way.
Nguyen works at the state level, affecting millions, whereas mutual aid often serves a neighborhood or city. For mutual aid to not have to exist, she says, we have to understand the structures in place for aid to be received at the community level, like community boards, and how can those structures be reconsidered. She says a lesson we can learn from the work of smaller mutual aid organizations is that things can always be done better. For example, with data to support that people are using their mobile devices more, it may be possible to place greater emphasis on building for mobile first. That design value is a different consideration than desktop in terms of accessibility, in screen reader type, and disability accessibility. Nguyen says, “Technology is changing so quickly. And any moment that we can learn, and incorporate human feedback, we'll all be better for it.”
Cameron Yick is a software engineer and one of the site developers behind NYC Vaccine List. The site launched in mid January to help get more people vaccinated by streamlining local government information into a bare bones site. The site gathers appointments from multiple sites to ease the burden on individuals trying to track down vaccination locations, openings, and updates. Yick’s work is grounded in creating effective visualizations that could democratize access by giving more people the chance to interact with these datasets. Last year, he worked on the public dataset Covidcommitment.org that informs individuals about the number of Covid-19 cases around them.
Yick works on the Vaccine List as an unpaid volunteer, afterwork and on the weekends. He is tasked with emphasizing what data will be most important to a user, writing automatic programs to crawl sites, and making tools for people who are constantly checking websites and calling local agencies to get vaccinations. The site’s volunteer group searches for websites that are too messy to be parsed by a program and calls places that don't put availability online. The small organization is keeping an eye on their site traffic, reading the site’s feedback on a regular basis, and working to reach eligible groups better.
Yick says, “Many of these are people who are not that tech literate, or English may not be their first language. Having a simple design, a website without lots of animations, or things whizzing around that could confuse people by too much information. That's been a very important design priority.”
And although NYC Vaccine List does not consider themselves a mutual aid organization, they are fundamentally working like one, a volunteer organization exchanging valuable tech knowledge to get more New York residents vaccination appointments.
Yick says, “What we are trying to do is collaborate with people who are working in communities already like mutual aid groups who working with older citizens and helping to sign them up directly. We don't want to replace that.”
Heidi Boisvert is co-founder of a mutual aid platform in development called LeanOn. That platform came together quickly in March 2020 through a group of tech artists and programmers who wanted to increase mobilization around issues of the global pandemic. They were challenged by the idea: If only communities were able to spread care more quickly than the virus.
Using natural language processing systems, a real-time map with data visualizations, and machine learning algorithms, the platform was built using open source tools so that it is not owned by any one person and that it can operate as a cooperative model of care. It connects social media and data collection, allowing communication across regions and countries. It was built to help grassroots organizations predict and prepare for future crises and connect with everyday citizens.
LeanOn is working to facilitate communication between ad hoc organizations, individual volunteers and track the meaningful work that they do. Imagine a platform where Mutual Aid Houston and NYC Vaccine List could cull their user data into useful graphics or pin their reach. LeanOn wants to be that place.
A challenge for any mutual aid platform will be privacy, surveillance, and ethics — building in safety to protect the most vulnerable communities. Boisvert and team hope to write a social contract with the communities who use the platform and publish them as open source community-based values. All users would be required to sign the agreement of these core values. Most importantly, they want to keep the platform from becoming a marketplace.
Boisvert says,“We need to move away from fear based systems of separation to love oriented principles of interdependence. The way we do that is by systems that are thinking interdependently.”
-Marina Garcia-Vasquez
To donate to Mutual Aid Houston click here. Follow them here @mutualaidhou
To learn more about NavaPBC click here.
To learn more about NYC Vaccine List click here.
To learn more about LeanOn click here.
Online Mutual Aid Links:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides guidance on digital security and privacy considerations for organizers and volunteers, to better protect the communities they work to support. (EFF)
The Digital Fund created a toolkit for grassroots communities needing to move their work into the digital realm for the first time. (Medium)
Omidyar published pointers for creating responsible design for digital communities during the pandemic. (Omidyar)
Texans used mutual aid to help their communities through a devastating winter storm (Texas Tribune)
New Yorkers with tech skills knew there was a better way to make vaccine appointments for older relatives. (New York Times)
Yearning for more technologists to connect the dots,
The New_ Public team
Illustration by Josh KramerCivic Signals is a partnership between the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and was incubated by New America.