Weeknotes: crisis response, supply chains, feminist perspectives, openness

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It's been nearly two weeks since my last weeknotes, which I'll blame on a busy period of consultancy this week, so this is rather too long. I feel I should provide an index so you can skip ahead to the good stuff, so in this fortnight's edition you can find:
  • a rant about being helpful in crises
  • a link to beautiful sketches of key workers 
  • notes on how mutual aid can work well and how community efforts need to sustain
  • feminist perspectives on catastrophe and on peer production
  • access to the internet for those in greatest need, and how we might change how we do things online from now on
  • thoughts about scaling up the UK PPE manufacturing response
  • various thoughts on supply chains, where things are made and who by, and repair
  • a couple of notes on the tech industry and being green
  • a handful of other things I found interesting
  • two Cat and Girl cartoons.
Someone asked this weekend what my ideal role would be in helping with UK PPE response. Aside from coordination, it seems my strongest / most unique skill is noting how uncollaborative some efforts are - even larger, powerful, well resourced ones - and trying to persuade them to work with others, build on the strengths of each group, and share what they have.  I can't claim much success on this. I did end up writing some quick thoughts for the Computer Science department, mostly out of frustration with Cambridge institutions "being very Cambridge" (as several others put it recently). Focussing effort on helping Cambridge - one of the best resourced parts of the UK with money, talented paid labour and highly skilled volunteers, and access to political power - is such a shortsighted and self-centred attitude, when other parts of the country (let alone the world) will need so much more and have so much less. Can we help locally and use what we build to help others too (even simply by sharing and publishing our practices)? Can we find others to work with, before we set up our own initiatives? Sigh.

Something is not necessarily better than nothing, writes Greg Bloom. This article reflects on his experience in Hurricane Irma and similar crises, and focusses on the need for community-lead response. There's a lot of value here - similar to last week's note about the absence of a UNOCHA in our response in the UK. In the PPE part of the response the challenge is how to engage with the affected populations in question - the health and care workers and their organisations.

Greg's experience of technical response in other crises is very similar to what has been happening now:
I also saw how readily regular people from all over the country and the world rallied to help online. This swarm of support was initially exhilarating, then eventually exhausting and frustrating. I saw alarming gaps between these digital responders’ good intentions, their ideas, and the reality of what people needed on the ground.

Most importantly, I saw how the most urgent and appropriate responses to the situation came directly from communities that were most vulnerable to this crisis. Local leaders like Vee Gunder were the first to respond in the communities, with the clearest line of sight to what was needed, and the strongest connection to the people in need — and they would still be there working after the attention withered away. Amid all the attention paid to either the mistakes of the formal institutions, and to the flashy websites and data visualizations produced by the network of civic hackers, these voices were the most important — yet the hardest to hear.

...In the week before the storm was projected to hit, I found myself spending 18+ hour days tending to the network. An enervating portion of that time entailed responding to crises that were precipitated by our own crisis responses. I intervened when I found people putting out information that could put vulnerable Florida residents (like undocumented residents or disabled people) in danger. I interjected when I found people hacking on “first thought best thought” applications that — if they’d ever be used at all — would waste a lot of time and energy, and maybe even make a messy situation worse. I spent hours a day asking why people were doing various things, and asking people to reconsider whether those things really ought to be done.
I've found myself basically doing community management and coordination a bit like this over the last few weeks, despite my best intentions to avoid ending up doing this. (Why? It's important and a neglected function in both digital and engineering communities. But it's labour I don't feel I'm particularly good at, it's often low status and gendered, and it's also a never-ending activity.) I suspect I have not been as robust in encouraging people to think as I might have been. That is now changing, as there has been more time for volunteers to think, and the wasteful efforts are larger now in scale. I'll be being the awkward person who calls out issues more firmly and loudly from now on.
The most common response I got was: “well we have to do something!” And I’d have to point out that this was not actually true.

These were difficult conversations. Everyone involved had the best of intentions. They were volunteering their time, out of care for people in danger. They did not feel like there was time to waste in “philosophical discussions,” and they did not feel like we should be “political.”

And at a glance one could understand where they were coming from: with no money and a matter of days, our network built websites, and generated data visualizations, that looked way better than those produced by government agencies and giant organizations with multi-million dollar budgets and timescales of years. Our digital products loaded faster. They were ‘user friendly.’

But just because they looked better, loaded faster, and felt nicer to click on, did not mean they were delivering more appropriate information.

Likewise, someone could (and did) build an app to dispatch random volunteers to “rescue” people in need — and many people volunteered for such rescues. But should we have been encouraging random untrained and unaccountable volunteers to travel by boat (or, in one case I heard from someone in the field, by jetski) to try to rescue vulnerable people? The answer did not seem obvious to me.

Yet we lacked shared criteria with which we — as a community — could critically evaluate what we could do, in order to figure out what we really should do.
The final principles of equitable disaster response from Greg are:
1) Ask — and listen. We support those who most directly experience the impacts of crisis, and we act in response to their expressed needs.

2) Distribute Power. We promote strategies that effectively distribute information, resources, and decision-making ability, so that people can most effectively adapt to their local circumstances.

3) Collaborate Strategically. We work with institutions, to the extent that such work is in service of our goals of equity and justice.

4) Seek Appropriate Solutions. We understand that problem solving is an ongoing process requiring varied skills — and while we identify common patterns, every situation is unique.

5) Use Appropriate Technology. We prefer tools that are simple, accessible, freely usable, and well-documented.
Cat Ainsworth looks at what data you need to serve the needs of the most vulnerable.  It's good to see that the government is going to support charities - including hospices - with substantial funding, as well as business support (which seemed to get more media attention).
You should look at Molly Crabapple's beautiful sketches of key workers in the crisis.
Ed Cox and Carey Bamber write about mutual aid and its difference from state-led aid:
It is already a matter of great national pride that in a matter of days more than 700,000 people registered to become NHS Volunteer Responders. ...

There has been far less celebration of more than 2500 hyper-local mutual aid groups that have quickly established to organise support for the most vulnerable on a street-by-street basis with volunteer street organisers doing leaflet drops, setting up WhatsApp groups and identifying support needs on a neighbour-to-neighbour basis.

... The principles of mutual aid couldn’t be further removed from a state-led intervention. Covid-19 Mutual Aid UK defines itself as “a group of volunteers aiming to support the network of local community groups organising to support people through the corona-virus pandemic. We are not in charge of this network and have no say over what local groups do.” It discourages local groups from working with the police, councils, NGOs and government bodies. ...

Locally, the Corona Helpers group set out to facilitate and mobilise neighbours helping and supporting each other, rather than creating a ‘helper and helped’ division. The simple principles of mutual aid, although with a commitment to working with local structures, has been effective thus far.

Sitting between NHS Volunteer Responders and the Mutual Aid movement is the established voluntary and community sector. This itself is far from a homogenous sector: from the huge national charities and national umbrella organisations that have spent recent weeks lobbying government on behalf of the charity sector, to the local councils of voluntary service and community organisations who have simultaneously transformed service provision while facing financial ruin.

.... Mutual aid is perceived by public agencies as some kind of ungovernable social movement which can’t be contained or managed, or even funded, and so can’t be trusted or brought to heel. After a decade of austerity, the voluntary and community sector is on its knees and lacks the capacity to do much more than transition its own services, let along engage with the emerging bureaucracies of the public sector effort. And to the external eye, the local public sector response has so far seemed fragmented: there are GPs, community nurses, care workers, social workers and a whole raft of council and NHS employees with ‘health’ in their job titles, but little clarity as to how they work together or combine their efforts with the community and voluntary activities that are scaling up.  
....Community resilience cannot depend on do-gooding volunteers any more than it can large-scale state intervention. There has to be some collaborative effort. It is too late now to be crying over the systems we have, we have a significant opportunity put in place right now the systems that we need to avert an even greater crisis and build bridges to the future.  We hope that the chance to build a deep, and lasting legacy of greater community cohesion through the development of enduring street level community networks is not lost as the public sector responds to this crisis. The time is ripe for collaboration and trust.
There is useful advice on how to do mutual aid well.  It's mostly classic social sector stuff - see what is already there, build on strengths, work together, listen.

http://catandgirl.com/pyramid-of-coronavirus-system/
Nathan Schneider reflects on the sustainability of today's volunteer efforts:
One thing about the mutual-aid mobilizations I have witnessed over the years is that they do not tend to last. Quick-and-easy connections in social media groups, with no structure but the compassion of volunteers—these are beautiful at first, until they begin to fade and reveal the absences of accountability and responsibility underneath. If our communities’ response is to be stronger than the virus, we will need to remember older forms of community-building, which translate enthusiasm into robust organization.
Nathan has been doing valuable work offering templates for communities to use in figuring out how they should work.
One small contribution I have been working on is a website called CommunityRule—a set of editable templates for how groups can self-govern, kind of like mini-constitutions. I have been inspired by some of the oldest governing documents still in use: medieval monastic templates like the Rules of St. Benedict and St. Augustine. A few simple guidelines can go a long way. If groups plan ahead for making hard decisions and defining roles, they have a better chance of weathering the challenges sure to come. When groups forget to do this, they risk finding themselves stuck with what the second-wave feminist Jo Freeman has called a “tyranny of structurelessness.”
Everyone imagined the wrong crisis, says Laurie Penny. Perhaps we thought too much about masculine forms of catastrophe.
The shock itself is shocking. Shouldn’t we have been more prepared? Hasn’t culture been drenched in catastrophe porn for decades? ... Lately, it’s been our default popular entertainment. ... More postapocalyptic entertainment has come out in the beginning of this century than in the entirety of the last one. ...The same story again and again, somewhere between wish fulfillment and trauma rehearsal, getting us used to the idea that the future was canceled, that someday soon everything would collapse, and there would be nothing left and nothing we could do about it.

Suddenly, the immense and frightening upheaval, the cataclysm that means nothing can go back to normal, is here, and it’s so different from what we imagined. I was expecting Half-Life. I was expecting World War Z. ... This apocalypse is less Danny Boyle and more Douglas Adams.

There’s an important difference between apocalypse and a catastrophe. A catastrophe is total devastation, with nothing left and nothing learned. “Apocalypse”—especially in the biblical sense—means a time of crisis and change, of hidden truths revealed. A time, quite literally, of revelation. When we talked about the end of every certainty, we were not expecting any revelation. We were not expecting it to be so silly, so sweet, and so sad.

“‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” That’s the slogan that swarmed around the world 10 years ago, during the Occupy movements. Attributed variously to Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, I first had it explained to me by overexcited, underslept young activists who, like the rest of us, had spent their lives watching New York and London and Washington and Tokyo blow up and burn down onscreen but had never had space to imagine a future that did not include decades of striving to service lifelong debts. Capitalism requires this of us. Capitalism cannot imagine a future beyond itself that isn’t utter butchery.

... The idea of a cleansing armageddon that instantly erases all the awkward parts of modernity, all the weary years of work and compromise between where we are and where we’d like to be, is universal, and universally childish. 
... Social democracy is being reinstated in a hurry, because—to paraphrase Mrs. Thatcher—there really is no alternative. In the US, states are scrambling to support the 3.5 million workers who filed for unemployment in a single week. London’s homeless population, which had doubled in a decade, has been eradicated overnight.

... Pop culture catastrophism didn’t prepare us for this. ... For one thing, it’s so relentlessly social. Most of our collective postapocalyptic visions have in common the fantasy of the world becoming smaller. Our heroes—usually white, straight men with traditional nuclear families to protect—are cut off from the rest of the world; the daydream is of finally shaking off the chains of civilization and becoming the valiant protector and/or tribal warrior they were made to be. And part of that catastrophe fantasy is relief—marauding biker gangs in bondage gear might want to murder you for half a tank of diesel and a sandwich, but at least you don’t have to worry about your credit history anymore. Or your college debt. Or your neighbors.

... I have lurked in countless stagnant ideological internet back alleys where young men excitedly talk about the coming end of civilization, where men can be real men again, and women will need protectors. How inconvenient, then, that when this world-inverting crisis finally showed up, we weren't given an enemy we could fight with our hands (wash your hands).

The end of the world has never been quite so simple a mythos for women, likely because most of us know that when social structures crack and shatter, what happens isn’t an instant reversion to muscular state-of-naturism. What happens is that women and carers of all genders quietly exhaust themselves filling in the gaps, trying to save as many people as possible from physical and mental collapse. The people on the front line are not fighters. They are healers and carers. The very people whose work is rarely paid in proportion to its importance are the ones we really need when the dung hits the Dyson. Nurses, doctors, cleaners, drivers. Emotional and domestic labor have never been part of the grand story men have told themselves about the destiny of the species—not even when they imagine its grave.

... My job will be the same as yours and everyone else’s: to be kind, to stay calm, and to take care of whoever happens to need taking care of in my immediate vicinity.
Nathan Schneider's v2 draft paper, The Tyranny of Openness: What Happened to Peer Production? seeks to bring a feminist perspective to this debate.
my claim is only that feminist thought lends a coherence to debates
about peer production that have otherwise confounded many participants.

... Rather than seeking to insulate the software
commons from transactional concerns, these projects seek to embed fair
transactions into the nature of the commons. In this sense they resemble
a kind of digital “wages for housework” campaign (Federici 2012), seeking
to name a form of exploitation through a demand that its otherwise hidden
economy come out into the open.

.... I conclude with reflections in the vein of what Benjamin J. Birkinbine
(2020) terms “subversive commoning”—a call to accept that “commons-based
movements will actively need to work to subvert capital logics” (p. 114).
Like the clever subversion of intellectual-property law that is the basis
of all “copyleft” licensing, the next subversions should be radical without
being utopian. They should draw people, for this-worldly reasons, into new
productive paradigms. Thus, those adding economic or ethical restrictions to
their licenses have reason to be concerned by evidence (e.g., Fershtman and
Gandal 2007) that restrictions on commercial use might inhibit contributions—
the coin of the realm in peer production.
Rather than continually adding restrictions, peer production licensing regimes
might be rethought from the ground up in terms of cultivating a deeper
reciprocity. Perhaps, to begin with, the focus on intellectual-property licens-
ing is an inadequate frame, and peer producers should turn toward other
techniques. That is, if peer production is to displace the firm as the dominant
mode of organizing production, it should have the capacity to offer a parallel
economy and a parallel ethics. Licenses alone are probably inadequate to
the task.

Visions of parallel institutions for peer producers have been theorized and
experimented on in such terms as “open value networks” (Siddiqui and
Brastaviceanu 2013) or “open cooperatives” (Bauwens and Kostakis 2014).
In these models, peer production is not peripheral to the firm, but provides
the logic for the firm itself. Early experiments have tended to be small-
scale or imperiled, but this could change in presence of a more robust
cultural and political ecosystem (Bauwens and Pantazis 2018). These kinds
of approaches introduce a new social contract for productive activity, one in
which contributors create public commons while also receiving remuneration
in proportion to the assessed value of their contributions. Contributors also
hold governance rights within a project and have a say over its internal
priorities and external partnerships. 
... Thus far, the prevailing governance logic in software peer production has been
along the lines of the “benevolent dictator for life,”... Strenuous commoning requires more serious attention to basic practices of accountable governance. ... Having explicit and responsive systems of governance is a prerequisite both for managing common resources and for enabling the kinds of ethical discourse that Open Source activists are increasingly demanding. A commons must have a means of discerning the common good.
I am still slightly surprised that public health messaging is using terminology I am sure most people don't understand. I've heard smart, sensible people say they are self-isolating, when they mean "staying at home most of the time but going out for food shops and runs". I've heard people say they are self-quarantining, when I am fairly sure they mean isolating. I'm also sure there are quite a few seniors who ought to be "shielding" who are actually just mostly staying home, and sometimes going for a walk. Perhaps we could have plain English next time.  

Diane Coyle on what productivity looks like in a pandemic [FT paywall].

Oli Barrett proposes furlunteering:

It's all very well being in lockdown if you have the internet. But 1.7 million people in the UK do not.  There's a new campaign to get internet access and devices to those in greatest need:
  https://futuredotnow.uk/devicesdotnow/
Talking Politics discussed cooperation vs competition - mostly in terms of states. The panel touched on technology - does the increased dependence on tech mean that we might be more concerned with who provides it, and where they are based? Does this question depend on what we mean by tech? AI, video conferencing? Or are they all interconnected?  This reminded me of the call for open video conferencing standards from last week.

Matt Webb writes about ideas for new forms of online video business which are viable now that people are willing to do more things online. What do we need technically to make these a reality?
Technically, we'll need to plug together three things to make ideas like this happen:

    a trusted social network that can handle different, overlapping groups of "close friends", and the idea of presence/availability -- I wonder if this could be built as a shared utility by several different companies, in a "public infrastructure" kind of way
    video software that interoperates with the various discovery endpoints (it's important, like Zoom, to have links in calendar invites), but that also allows programmatic access -- Twilio's video call APIs might be the infrastructure here
    video calling which is as interoperable as the phone network. We need peering between Zoom, FaceTime, WhatsApp video calls, Houseparty, etc. If this is going to work, it's ludicrous to force a patient who is already familiar with FaceTime to download Zoom to talk to their consultant.
How do you know what designs for face masks, face shields, scrubs and other equipment are good to use for what purpose?  There's still no central guidance in the UK on this, for the cases where traditional PPE is not available. Cloth masks are a case in point - the risk profile they help with for a person at home running errands is fundamentally different to a hospital nurse with COVID-19 patients who has no access to a proper mask, and is making do with a homemade cloth mask and perhaps a face shield too.

Makespace's production process has produced thousands of visors to a spec acceptable to the local hospital trust - you can download the full documentation on design, process and traceability here. Other hospitals won't accept these though because, despite the responsible process, the visors are not formally CE marked.

Juggling local needs and global design and expertise sharing is particularly challenging at this time.  Requirements from healthcare organisations vary; local regulations and guidance varies from place to place; material availability also varies. The communities working on understanding what's possible, especially for improvised solutions where traditionally-used components and materials are not available, tend to be international. Most of the communities are full of well-meaning people who want to do things, and are desperately short of community managers or coordinators to help them along. Joining up communities is also lacking; the detective work to figure out what is going on and synthesise and share it is important, dull, infrastructure work.

We face the need to continue to scale up PPE provision, and to consider that some level of equipment demand will be ongoing, not just a short term surge, in a global context where everyone wants PPE and the materials to make it. Methods for sterilisation at scale, and material reuse, are likely to be required soon.

Legal advice on liabilities and appropriate labelling for equipment seems to vary, too.  I've been asked to help a local project (OSVI - one of many open source ventilator efforts) working on ventilator design for low and middle income countries, with the specific question of how to best open source their work. Some legal advice says that disclaimers (along the lines of "this design is for use by professionals who know what they are doing, it's not for home hackers") can be useful, other advice says it's not. The risk here is sharing design work which could be used irresponsibly to cause harm; the desire to share is to open up access to ventilator equipment to as many people as possible, and the project is also thinking about routes to value chain and business model, because ultimately making things costs money, and you need to offer value in the things made. In this international setting it's especially tricky to figure out the way forward, as distributed manufacture, open source, and medical product liability/regulations are all separate specialisms with little overlap.

The questions of several weeks ago - how are demand and supply coordinated in the UK, across NHS and other care environments, and across the informal community PPE production and factories - are still unanswered. We'd all assumed, I think, that something would happen. Matt Hancock announced new NHS logistics activity, but it's not visible to the people I'm working with who are producing PPE for various NHS bodies around the UK. It still feels like no one is coming. It is up to us. 

The latest estimate from my old Field Ready colleague Mark Mellors is 400k visors a day to meet all UK needs. That's a lot.

Big organisations are starting to appear.  Jaguar made some visors - and perhaps they will publish their designs - but 1,300 a week is not large for a company of this scale. Makespace Cambridge, a volunteer-run community workshop with volunteers working shifts, is making more than this.  Serious groups such as the Henry Royce Institute are starting to gather information on manufacturing capability - adding to the noise of the many attempts doing this, and not evidently building a useful public resource or working with others. Such organisations should have scale and organisation to help out in significant sustained ways.  Do they need support, and if so what? (The volunteer community has proven designs which have been trialled and evaluated, now; they also have growing experience getting equipment to groups in need, especially at the level below major hospital trusts.)


Once more, some of us are re-evaluating what would be the most useful thing we could do now - if anything, of course.
Jiri Svorc and  Andrew Katz write about an example of how open hardware could help in crisis engineering, with a study of a 2010 MIT ventilator project.

Joshua Pearce's pre-print on distributed manufacturing in crisis includes thoughtful observations on a variety of topics, based on a study of open hardware solutions for the needs published by the government of India.  These include that a diversity of designs means individual material supply chains are less critical, and if one material becomes unavailable, other designs can be used. Makerspaces and their accessibility in pandemic conditions is something Makespace has been working on. The potential extension of Good Samaritan laws to cover engineering and open hardware is also interesting, although this seems like a good example of country-specific setups which global communities struggle to work with.

One section looks at the use of public funds to support innovation:
Is it tolerable for citizens to be excluding from using technologies they funded?
There are many examples of this particular problem, but perhaps the most egregious currently- relevant example is the number 1 request of ventilators on the list from India for the COVID-19 pandemic. In the U.S., federal research money was invested in private companies to specifically develop this life-saving technology to prepare for just such a pandemic as is occurring now. Public funds were given to a company, Newport, to create a low-cost ventilator, yet the project stalled as Newport was acquired by Covidien, and no ventilators were ever delivered. Both “government officials and executives at rival ventilator companies said they suspected that Covidien had acquired Newport to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business.” Then, Covidien was in turn purchased by Medtronic. Interestingly, Medtronic just obtained a substantial amount of positive press for providing a temporary permissive license for a ventilator and providing some design files. After inspection of the initial release, although many files were included, both software and CAD files were not apparent. This obviously limits the ability of anyone to replicate the device without Medtronic’s direct assistance. Medtronic may release all files and help as many fabrication facilities as possible build their design until all of the global demand for ventilators is met. Or, they may not, as they have already done more than all of the other ventilator vendors have to date. All of the other commercial ventilator companies have this same choice. To prevent the lives of the world’s citizens from being held ransom for the profits of such companies for any life-saving device or supply in the future, all government-funded research could have a requirement for free and open source licensing.
As well as air freight costs increasing, we might expect shipping costs to increase - it's a hard time to be a sailor, says Adam Minter. 

Sharing this article really only for the figures on import pricing from china -  "£150 only buys enough FFP3 respirator masks to care for one patient in Intensive Care for one day: £1,000 buys 100 pairs of scrubs for staff to wear when working with patients with COVID-19."  We are moving now into financing and sourcing large volumes of PPE which will need to sustain over time, not just deal with a short term surge. This is especially true if we also consider other groups needing or wanting PPE. (The UK guidance on what to use when does not consider what people might want.)  We will need sustainable supply chains (meaning financing, materials, manufacturing and distribution) to cope with ongoing demand and to build up stock for future surges. The many crowdfunders for PPE in the UK, some well informed and working with medical groups who want their output, and others apparently making ad hoc, are the wrong way to fund essential public health supplies, biased towards wealthy internet-savvy areas, too small, and unsustainable.

Lucia Corsini has written up a summary of maker movement response to COVID-19.

Open Contracting (truly a blast from the past for me, taking me back to my Open Knowledge days) shared notes from a call looking at how COVID-19 was affecting procurement.

On The Maintainers list, a post from iFixit -
We put out a call for manuals, and the medical community responded:
https://www.ifixit.com/News/36354/help-us-crowdsource-repair-information-for-hospital-equipment

 We have been donated a trove of tens of thousands of medical equipment service manuals. We’ve already uploaded the high-priority ventilators to iFixit, and now we’re working on getting the rest online.
https://www.ifixit.com/c/ventilator

 iFixit’s team of about ten technical writers has been working to organize these files for the last two weeks, and we’re just overwhelmed. We can’t do it on our own.

 We estimate that we have about 2,000 hours of file curation and organization to build this library. I am looking for people willing to donate at least 20 hours of time. The work is straightforward but requires attention to detail—mostly file organization and renaming. It’s a chance to learn a lot about the medical device maintenance world in a short amount of time! Did you know that hospitals have machines for calibrating their endoscopy machines? Well, you do now!

 Can you help? Do you know someone that can? We need librarians, academics, and anyone else with a love for organization and a little extra time right now. No specific repair or medical knowledge is required.

 Reach out to techwriting@ifixit.com if you can help!
Ingrid Burrington on supply chain capitalism and what might come next:
Also apparent is that the decisions that tend to make supply chains fragile (such as excessive concentration of production under one vendor or point of distribution) are decisions that tend to be rewarded by markets and governments. ... The failures of healthcare manufacturing supply chains in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic have been very hard to ignore or view as simply the market working as it should (despite the fact it sort of is). Massive shortages of personal protective equipment and ventilators may be producing profits at some point in the supply chain, but the public primarily sees price gouging, fraud, and hospital workers having to make dangerous improvisations like wearing trash bags instead of protective gowns. A combination of industry consolidation, trade war-induced conservative inventory, and government incompetence all contributed to this perfect storm of conditions. 
... The dynamics of healthcare and consumer supply chains are not unique to supply chains in the time of COVID-19, so much as COVID-19 uniquely amplifies them for audiences that normally take them for granted. These are more or less the workings of what Anna Tsing has previously described as supply chain capitalism, a process that “stimulate[s] both global standardization and growing gaps between rich and poor, across lines of color and culture, and between North and South,” reliant on, and at times undone, by its emphasis on outsourcing and exploitation of cultural myths around work, identity, and the pursuit of wealth.

Supply chain capitalism principles—reliance on outsourced labor, an emphasis on just-in-time delivery, faith in data-driven decision-making, pursuit of economies of scale—have played, at times, an under-appreciated role in the emergence of digitally-enabled inequities that COVID-19 will also likely exacerbate. The languages of supply chain management and software engineering tend to overlap and borrow from one another (lean operations, just-in-time delivery, containerization); arguably many of the operations underlying surveillance capitalism can’t happen without supply chain capitalism. 
.... What is the gig economy, if not a just-in-time supply chain for disposable human labor?

... To create conditions so that the next time there’s a pandemic (and there will be one) we don’t have massive shortages of medical supplies or workers compromising their health and safety, the whole of supply chain capitalism needs to be broken apart and reconsidered—including the values and beliefs that make so many other systemic inequalities possible before COVID-19. ... The insistence that dignity and life aren’t as essential as efficiency and market performance needs to be undermined with a social safety net that protects all people, including and especially workers most at risk, whether faced with a pandemic or simply faced with run-of-the-mill cruelties of capitalism.
Matt Webb on whether this will all lead to local manufacturing, rather than the hegemony of China we've assumed recently.

Guardian article on various aspects of food stockpiling and access.
April Fool. https://agreenergoogle.com/

New principles for sustainable software engineering - principles.green. Lots of good tips as well as this summary:
    Carbon: Build applications that are carbon efficient.
    Electricity: Build applications that are energy efficient.
    Carbon Intensity: Consume electricity with the lowest carbon intensity.
    Embodied Carbon: Even if you are not consuming electricity, you have still emitted carbon and must account for it.
    Energy Proportionality: Run servers at a high rate of utilization.
    Networking: Reduce the amount of data and distance it must travel across the network.
    Demand Shifting: Be flexible regarding when and where you run workloads to take advantage of low carbon intensity electricity.
    Measurement & Optimization: Focus on end-to-end optimizations that increase the overall carbon efficiency.
Cat and Girl is on fire at the moment. 

http://catandgirl.com/look-on-the-bright-side/

I enjoyed Experiencing Awe Now by Alastair Somerville. HT Naomi Turner.
This post is about how understanding the experience of Awe may help you sense your own place in a new land. It also may help you understand that both time and social connection are needed to find new foundations in such a new place.

 I will use three sections to describe how Awe can work.

     Now: Physical sensations and Self diminishment
    Next: Perceived vastness and Time perception
    Later: Connectedness and Accommodation
Phil Gyford on whimsy struck a chord.
And I think a bit about the London Olympic 2012 opening ceremony which was enormous fun but also, now, seems like a culmination of some of that whimsy. Whimsy raised to the level of spectacle. It presented an illusion that we, in the UK, are “all in this together” and have a shared common history of tolerance, dynamism and fun. Some of us have looked back on it as if it was the last time when everything was fine when, in fact, it was the last time we allowed whimsy to deceive us about what much of the country is like.

 And I think about everyone clapping to support “NHS staff and other key workers”, and particularly about Conservative MPs and Conservative voters clapping to support the people they’ve underfunded and sold off and taken for granted, and I think about how whimsy is a great way to whitewash the worst things.

     it’s about *feeling* connected, *feeling* special, *feeling* spontaneous, *feeling* beneficent — whether you *are* or not. it’s disinterested in any reality beyond the affective one.
The weather has been great, and the garden blooming.