Please Tell Me if This is a Bad Idea

Last night when I went to bed, I lay there for a while feeling disheartened and unable to sleep. What are you thinking? I kept asking myself. Everything is bad. Beyond bad. Like we're at the brink of civil war AND war with our beloved allies. Not only is ICE brutalizing communities, they're now taking cellphone pictures of each passenger on flights leaving the country. There are still no jobs. Meanwhile, you want to talk and write about... how to build better tech? How people should be nicer to each other on the internet? Get real. It's too late. No one wants to read that right now.

And then I had an idea. Not about whether people want to listen what I have to say; I'm leaving that problem for another sleepless night. No, I had an idea, and I need to you to tell me if it already exists. If it doesn't, I need you to tell me if it could work.

Allow me to preface this idea with two caveats and one explanation. First the caveats:

1. This idea may be extremely bonkers or dumb. That's ok. I'm not always precious about my ideas, especially not early stage product ideas. They can—and should!—be bounced around, tinkered with, iterated on. I will push back when I believe in something, like the core of the idea or the fundamental reasons behind the idea, but the actual shape the idea takes is always a work in progress, especially in the beginning. And especially an idea like this.
2. I am absolutely not expert in many of the things I am about to write about. I'm neither an information architect nor a programmer. I'm certainly not a security expert. I don't know a ton about mutual aid. I am not looking to be the tech disrupter who says I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS BUT WHEN HAS THAT EVER MATTERED. This is just an idea that has me kind of jazzed. Plus I did run it by a good friend who is way more knowledgeable than I about both software development and mutual aid (more on that in a bit), and after our fun conversation I felt more confident writing about it.

Now the explanation. I think I've shared this before, but it's worth repeating so bear with me. In product development, I like to think of product strategy as two separate but related pieces. To make it easy, I call them big S strategy and little s strategy. Big S strategy is the vision or ultimate goal we'd like to work toward. Even if we never get there, even if it’s never fully achieved, it's the ideal we want to come as asymptotically close to as we can. This is the sort of strategy you might set every two to five years, adjusting and tweaking as you figure stuff out and as actual humans use the thing you're making. Little s strategy, on the other hand, consists of all the small steps we take to move toward that big S. We want steps that don’t lock us in, that allow us to build in a relatively smart way but also adjust or work if we change our minds or realize we've made a mistake. We want to be able to shift ("pivot" in industry parlance) without infrastructure decisions locking us in or a huge amount of tech debt (engineering speak for the cost to maintain, fix, or change a system—and also the cost of a quick solution now vs. a bigger, more robust solution).

Ok, that's out of the way. What prompted last night's what's-the-point-of-anything-I'm-doing mindset was, obviously, everything going on in the US and in the world. I felt overwhelmed, especially since so much of it is beyond my control or my ability to influence. Just a very doom-y vibe all around. But then I started thinking about what is in my control and what I can to. I thought about the bravery of everyone in Minneapolis, as well as the mutual aid, like people doing laundry for folks who need to avoid ICE agents staking out laundromats (The People's Laundry). There's also a group of volunteers 3D printing whistles to send for free to communities (3D Printed Whistles) who want to warn neighbors about raids. I thought about the work I've been doing to help my friend and her family with their immigration situation, as well as some volunteer work I did at the start of the pandemic, when I volunteered with an ad-hoc group that sprang up to distribute N94 masks to healthcare workers across NYC.

Then I thought: All of this is replicable. All of this has to be replicable. And judging by our current situation, it seems like we're going to need more of this kind of support for quite a while to come. So what if we could come up with a system that was secure and that allowed people to quickly spin up different programs that maximize all the amazing work existing and ad-hoc organizations have already done? I don't want to reinvent the wheel, and no one else wants to do duplicative work, so what if we made something that supported and scaled community and mutual aid efforts without getting in the way or undermining them? Some sort of open source/mutual aid modular CRM system, but one that isn't about sales or customers or profit. A system that quickly allowed organizers to safely, securely organize volunteers, connect them with donors/resources and with people in need, and share materials in any city.

Like, you want to help people in your city with laundry? You'll want to keep track of the people who need laundry done as well the people who can do laundry, plus transportation, donations, supplies, and so on. Here you go.

Or you want to help people find good legal aid, manage their cases, talk to lawyers, and find funding? Choose this module, and we'll give you the steps to organize and vet volunteers, the services in your area that can provide real legal advice or assistance, the tools to contact and vet lawyers, the various processes you'll help people through, fundraising tools, and how to connect with and vet people requesting help.

My smart friend Darius, whom I mentioned earlier, said that one of the things that about mutual aid is that the inefficiency keeps people safe. Mutual aid tends to be done through whisper networks, using text or in secure chat, so that an entire database of people and their personal information doesn't end up in the hands of those who wish to do them harm. This was a good point! My response was: An entire industry of computer geniuses and security experts are capable of building vast surveillance networks and highly secure databases. Meanwhile hackers infiltrate and take down Nazi dating sites. It doesn't seem impossible that some of these smart people, the ones who want to help, could come up with a system that keeps personal information secure while allowing existing organizations and new volunteers to spin up support systems in a crisis, depending on the various needs at hand.

Let me pause here: As you know, I am very much not someone who thinks "the solution to a problem is to make some software." If anything, I am the opposite. I also think there are a lot of established non-profits and mutual aid orgs that people should work with rather than come in and try to solve a problem they know very little about. But in this case, specifically in this moment, I think this might be a rare example of when software could facilitate the ways humans solve these problems. We're not looking at software to solve the problems for us. I just want it to help more people get organized.

There are resources out there. I did look online. Mutual Aid Disaster Relief has links to a lot of resources that I'm checking out. There's Action Builder, which is an organizer tool for organizers, but I'm not 100% sure what it does (and it feels different from what I'm talking about here). I can't find anything out there that does what I'm thinking of, although if it exists, obviously tell me. The toolkits tend to be quite general, very tech-y, sadly littered with broken links, or on The Anarchist Library. No offense to the latter (truly), but I worry people who are out there saying "I've never protested or done anything like this" will be unlikely to find their way to The Anarchist Library and thus will not discover those resources. But those people know how to run carpools and bake sales and HOAs. They can get shit done!

Plus, not to get too user research-y on you, but I very much know what the answer would be if you asked people "would you like to read all this material on how to organize a non-hierarchical group OR would you like to use this app and help people get their laundry done." A lot of the time, I think people say "I want to help, but I don't know what to do" when they really mean "I wish the thing I could do would be more obvious and maybe more immediately accessible. Literally please just tell me what to do." This is where handbooks can be helpful, I know, but what if we could provide more than handbooks? What if we could provide an entire modular system that provides an alternate infrastructure at scale to get services to people, during a time when the actual infrastructure is causing them harm? This is the big crazy dream of an idea I had.

A lot of people feel helpless and useless right now. But most of them aren't useless. (Most.) Some of them have tech skills, some have design skills, some are writers, some are doers or talkers or organizers. This big S strategy idea isn't something I think we build all at once. It's expensive and hard, and anyway a top down design is not the right way to go about it. But what if we started with one local group? What if we came up with a way of housing people's information that was secure both technologically but also personnel-wise, protecting volunteers and people in need from harm and from grifters? What if we asked for volunteers to design and write copy and raise money, because a project like this is expensive? What if rather than waiting for the crisis to come to our cities, we made use of our time and our skills, and built for the crisis that already exists?

Or maybe I'm crazy. Please tell me if I am. But if I'm not, let's do this. I have more thoughts, obviously, but hopefully this is enough to start iterating and arguing.

Until next Wednesday.

Lx