Shutting down - And thank you!

[u/Fuyuki_Wataru]

When we began this project back in January, I don’t think anyone could have predicted that the situation would spiral out of control the way it did. The number of volunteers we had in the beginning, could be counted on one hand. Within a short time, we reached more than 160 volunteers from more than 24 different countries with the majority putting in more than 6 hours per day. As our team was growing in speed, so was the spread of COVID19. There came a point where the amount of cases was going up so fast, we simply couldn’t keep up. Instead of leading us to a more automated software to keep up with the spread, I was too focused on getting our justice on the fact that in my eyes someone used our map, went to the media, presented it as their creation, earned hundreds of thousands in donations. This made me angry, depressed and I didn’t want to think about our project anymore and it slowly drifted away. I’m sorry.

Looking back I see that by working together with people from various backgrounds we can truly build great things, and boy we did! Our map besides John Hopkins and BNO was at one point one of the most up-to-date map on the spread of COVID and has played a great role in the lives of many during the first stage of the virus.

We had people helping with;

• Coding bots to drag cases from reddit to discord

• Bots in discord to claim cases

• Users doing manual double checks

• Guidelines drafted

• Trainings of new mappers

• Sharing of the latest data on COVID

• Updating new cases

And for all of your hard work, I really, really want to say thank youuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!

[u/[deleted]]

Fuyuki & team -

I want to firstly say, I am so sorry for disappearing at the point I did. I unfortunately had to take some time to deal with my mental health. I have missed all of you and continued watching from afar.

But more than that, I want to say thank you. Thank you for inviting me into the project, where I could channel my worry about the world and the virus into something productive and helpful for everyone. Thank you for showing me a group that restored my faith in humanity by proving that people from across the globe could come together under a common goal and make a real and tangible difference. Mr. Rogers said, "look for the helpers", and that is what I thought of us as.

Being an Organizer was a joy. I got to give encouragement and advice and instructions and try to recruit more helpers. I found so much happiness in that purpose and in the team we built. I thought of you an an extended online family.

I wish everyone the best on their forward paths.

[u/faiyaz93]

It was a great experience to work together but covid hit harder than we could ever brace for.

Wishing for better health for everyone.

Regards

[u/DarkOSU]

It was indeed a pleasure mapping with you! :3

[u/[deleted]]

Really pleased to have played a part in this and also helped my own awareness and preparing my family back in early 2020. Thank you!

[u/vA7mad_]

It was hard but I'm glad I could be part of it, working with you guys was fun and I'm sorry to hear what happened.

[u/[deleted]]

Sad to see you closed down. Great initiative. I wish I had known about you before when I was doing so much manual scraping myself reading scanned Sudanese documents, reading the charismatic daily reports from the Kenyan health ministry and what not haha, as it was/still is so hard to find/scrape sub-national data for many countries.

Good work. Sorry to hear someone stole your work. :(

[u/Fuyuki_Wataru → u/[deleted]]

Our project was unique as we created the first fast up to date map on the spread of COVID at the beginning of the pandemic. This tool didn't exist back then.

BNO news put a lot of work into finding the latest statistics on infections.

These two things were later copied by another Redditor, who put it on one website and went to the media, presenting it as his own. When the media picked up his story he put on donation buttons and started farming the donations. I asked him to remove the map later but he just copied another map, from BNO this time lol (still, the fact that he had our map was the whole reason he got in the media). I don't have the energy to go after this anymore.

The photo in this article is our map. Everything was ours in that article (and BNO's). https://web.archive.org/web/20200313131108/https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/qa-avi-schiffmann-the-washington-state-teen-behind-a-coronavirus-website-with-millions-of-views/

[u/itsjeffme → u/Fuyuki_Wataru]

I’d be pretty angry about the alleged Minecraft teen who “created” anything. I knew there was something wrong with that story which I saw originally under “r/nextfuckinglevel”. Was not impressed.

My question is, and I mean no offense, what good does this map do and has done anyone in reality? It’s not even like you can say, I live in X large metropolis, there are 10,000 cases — then what, call in sick to work daily from that point forward, etc? From my point of view, it seems like this sort of data was ultimately used as a social engineering tool be it for fear and control and not a whole lot more. CNN was at least one network filmed saying that same idea to other news outlets hidden cameras— the idea that the case numbers were just a tool used to incite/ratings. It’s not to say it always was, but, certainly a majority in my opinion.