Updated COVID-19 Numbers (March 20, 2020) and Thoughts

Update: A new iteration is now available:

My morning ritual for the past week has been to update my COVID-19 spreadsheet and ponder my chart. Here’s the latest:

On the one hand, if you compare it to last week’s chart, it’s not a happy result for those of us in the U.S. (Italy’s curve might be flattening. We’ll see next week.) On the other hand, remember that this is a lagging indicator. This past week’s line was essentially pre-determined by what happened the previous week. Earlier this week, the Bay Area instituted shelter-in-place. Shortly thereafter, California made it state-wide, and New York and Illinois followed suit after that. We’ll see if this has any noticeable impact next week.

I made one slight tweak to the graph (adding labels to the axes; thanks to Kate Wing for the gentle scolding). I’d like to change the gridlines on the x-axis to every seven days, but can’t do that in Google Sheets. Not a huge deal. I’d also like to experiment with a log 2 graph (versus log 10) on the y-axis to more easily show how many days it takes for new cases to double, but again, can’t do that from Google Sheets. Again, not a big deal. I’d also like to do a region-by-region analysis, as suggested by many others and made possible by David Janes’ data, but haven’t gotten around to that yet.

I started doing all of this as an exercise in self-care. I wanted to understand what was happening, and I found what I was reading to be not just largely unhelpful, but actually debilitating. This has helped a lot. There is something very calming about looking up numbers, plugging them into a spreadsheet, and pondering the results, even if the results aren’t very good. (Come to think of it, this also played a huge role in helping me achieve better work-life balance, so it might be a pattern.) I haven’t been able to avoid the media as much as I hoped, but it’s helped me make sense of what I’m seeing and ignore articles and missives that are generally unhelpful or worse. It’s also validating when folks who understand this stuff far better than me are coming to similar conclusions.

I’ve loved seeing friends and others play with the data as well. One of the best websites I’ve seen is Covid Act Now, which shows state-by-state projections based on hospital capacity and what we understand about different interventions. They’ve also shared their model openly, and they’re posting the right disclaimers. (Good rule of thumb: Be skeptical of anyone who claims certainty about their conclusions unless they’re an epidemiologist, and even then, take everything with a grain of salt.)

I’m also inspired by everyone working on the front lines — from health care workers to domestic workers — and to those who are doing their part to support those who are. (Hat tip to Jon Stahl for sharing the amazing work that Carl Coryell-Martin instigated, for example.) Stay safe everyone, stay at home if you can, and be well.

The Brilliant Essence of Wikis

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had an unusually large number of discussions about the essence of Wikis — why they are so beautiful and important as Collaborative Tools. I realized I’ve never posted my thoughts on the topic, so I’m correcting that here.    (JTE)

Wikis have this brilliant feature, a feature that’s so simple and obvious, it’s often overlooked, yet it’s largely responsible for the success of Wikis. Incidentally, it’s also an intentional feature, which is yet another reflection of Ward Cunningham‘s design genius.    (JTF)

In a nutshell, that feature is the ability to Link As You Think by writing the name of the page, even if the page you want to link to doesn’t currently exist.    (JTG)

While you’re letting that sink in, let’s look at a measurable way this feature is valuable. A lot of folks view Wikis as a crude CMS. I don’t dispute this perspective — you can certainly use Wikis that way — but it’s not what makes Wikis interesting. Nevertheless, I see queries all the time on various nonprofit technology lists asking to compare Wikis to other CMSes, so here goes. It takes at least three steps to link to a new page with most CMSes (create new page, go to old page, create link), whereas it only takes only one with Wikis (write page name). That’s significant.    (JTH)

What really makes the Wiki’s Link As You Think feature special is that it facilitates the creation of Shared Language among the community that uses it. As I’ve said so often here, Shared Language is an absolute prerequisite for collaboration. The lack of Shared Language is the most common roadblock to effective collaboration, be it a small work team or a community of thousands.    (JTI)

Look at the page index of any Wiki, and you’ll see the vocabulary of that community. Thanks to the other affordances of the tool, that vocabulary accomodates multiple definitions while encouraging convergence where appropriate. Most importantly, that vocabulary is Shared Language that has emerged from the community itself and that continues to evolve.    (JTJ)

Here’s a real example. At the AdvocacyDev Wiki, which Blue Oxen Associates hosts, the top six most linked-to pages (out of 363 total) are:    (JTK)

From this very small sample, we can see that VoIP (and Asterisk in particular), IndyVoter, and CivicSpace are all much discussed tools among folks working on online advocacy tools. We can also see that Carl Coryell-Martin is an active member of this community (or at least one of the more diligent members when it comes to documenting).    (JTR)

The Wiki’s ability to facilitate Shared Language — a direct consequence of Link As You Think — is what makes it so important as a Collaborative Tool. In the future, when enough developers recognize this, we’ll see widespread integration of Wiki functionality in other Collaborative Tools, such as blogs, online forums, and more. It’s already started. Blog-Wiki integration (such as what I use) is not uncommon, and software like TWiki and JotSpot are showing the benefits of custom applications that use Wikis as the fundamental data structure.    (JTS)