(2023-04-08) Kissane Matches Pebbles Hair Salt

Erin Kissane: Matches, pebbles, hair, salt. Two years ago, I left the most meaningful and by far the most wrenching job I’ve ever had. I wrote about it before we wound down, and afterward said almost nothing.

The COVID Tracking Project (COVID-19)

we built an organization to compile, contextualize, and disseminate a daily national pandemic dataset for the United States, running on almost entirely volunteer labor.

With our faces pressed against the glass of all that data, we started to get a feel for the underlying patterns though which case numbers turned to hospitalizations, and then, some weeks later, to death counts

And all the while, the federal government—the people who should have been doing the work to begin with—flailed and bit itself and hid its own best reports from the public

But while all that was happening, something else was running alongside: Our bare-bones work offered a severe kind of clarity and purpose, and the culture of gratitude, pragmatic support, and unabashed love we built inside the project kept us alive.

I came into the tracking project believing that there were better ways to work together than most of us experience, that most people want a chance to do good work. (Product Team)

then the world changed again and I got back some of that Le Guinean sense that the locked-up technological present was maybe more malleable than I’d thought

So: New website. New writing. What is happening to us?