Like many other messages you are getting right now, this one is about COVID-19. Unlike those messages, we are not writing to offer bland corporate messaging about how seriously we are taking the situation.
Instead, we want to talk about what we can do differently together that will help us respond more effectively to this crisis and to the ones that will inevitably follow.
The challenges COVID-19 presents to society are precisely the challenges we have been building TallyLab to address. It is clear in this moment that we need the people on the ground in distributed circumstances collecting more data in ways that allow them to efficiently and safely collaborate. It is also clear in this moment that we run the risk of re-entrenching key components of our current vulnerability – e.g. centralization of data sources and stores – because we don’t yet have new structures in place.
This is the moment the TallyLab team has been building towards. Knowing that situations like this are likely to be part of the “new normal” for humanity going forward, we wanted to make sure we got it right. We’ve made significant progress, but the reality is that the future arrives unevenly; we now find ourselves scrambling to accelerate our timeline.
We sadly don’t yet have the data-sharing functionality inside TallyLab that will both democratize data collection and restructure data collaboration to protect individuals. But we have been re-invigorated by this pandemic. Regardless of the resources at our disposal, Mark and I remain – and will remain – committed to building for both this crisis and the the inevitable next one.
Please reach out to us if you have a COVID-related project in the works that could use a privacy-first, decentralized data platform. Let's build the future together.
Be well and stay safe!