Storymapping and Wireframes by Sandy Kauer

#WirVsVirusHack — Ad hoc digitalization in 48 hours against Covid-19

7 min readJul 11, 2020

As a service designer with the right tool-setup, co-designing an OpenAPI framework construction kit for the German Federal Government and the world
- by Sandy Kauer

German article here: https://www.sandykauer.com/post/wirvsvirushack-deutschlands-gr%C3%B6%C3%9Fter-digitaler-hackaton-crashed-slack-mit-ca-42-000-teilnehmenden

FunFactsFirst

about 3 hours delayed to start the event
809 project briefings to read in “Airtable”
42,968 logins shut down mail server & Slack
28.361 participants have made it to the end

#1 LEARNING
Digitalized events have to be prepared & planned. Here the capacity of the tools should be tested in terms of participants and functionality.

Lazy reader? Just Check important links:

OPEN SOURCE Git-Hub: https://github.com/OneTrackingFramework
Sneak_Prototype: https://infectionchain.bencabrera.de/#/start?returnUrl=%2F
Project_Portfolio: https://devpost.com/software/infection-chain
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm21i9Muork

What the hack … what?

It' s am event (also in companies and enterprises) in which collaborative work is done on software and hardware solutions.

Goal? Fast incremental development of innovative solutions across disciplines on a topic during the 48 hours. Topics are challenged solution-oriented / problem solving.

Who? Classically — development level. But that is outdated: Be clever and let the all stakeholder contribute.

Kill the Corona Virus | Covid-19

If you ever have the clever idea to provide and collected 809 project ideas until one day before the event starte, please make sure they are not double. The cool thing: problems & hurdles were gathered, from people with diverse focus ( social engagement | health care | political orientations | artists | SME support | apps | cloud solutions and AI blockchain solutions | just haters).

#2 Learning for efficient event-backlog:
Plan the time to evaluate and merge input so that identical project groups are not created. It is good to work on identical ideas, but it is more efficient to go into a hackathon with different approaches. Here THE AIRTABLE link from which insane 1500 solutions were created

The project: “Isolate the virus, not the people”

— OpenAPI-tracking-framework (Most tangible in an app)

My team of strangers was self-organized and we in several “back and forth” messages within minutes. We created an miro board to organize the idas. Quickly clear: thoughts had to be quickly transformed into tasks, after all, the goal was to “save the world” within 48 hours.

I was positively surprised by the iterative approach of the group based on hours. Thus, goals could be defined quickly and the board and tasks could be derived accordingly. How we performed:

Getting to know each other and exchanging skillsets
5 developers | 1 service designer | 2 project managers | 1 mentor
Discussing problems and hurdles in a team
The solution should be evaluated by all — to guarantee the knowledge transfer
Define product idea and goals
OpenAPI tracking framework as basis | provide templates | single source of truth — concept will be available to the world to develop “pandemic” apps on their own
Deriving challenges to CoreCases
- Data security | GDPR | onboarding | context of use in conjunction with “medical response centers” | “government authorities” | “scale with institution and people
- Keep the workflow high especially after 30 hours of continuous design and development
Update reporting & formats for collaborative working
- post reports in team chat every two hours and get leads
- use cloud solutions as a place for collection and distribution
RapidResearch | Wireframes | Sharing
- TheQuickMarketingCheck: Search Appstore for existing tracking solutions
- TheTalkAboutTheSameTrick: Behance, Dribbble… for first and internal thought-provoking impulses
- ThePersonaNeedsHypothesis: Collect YouTube for first insight about the defined cases
JourneyMapping | RequirementDefinition | Backend | FE
Orchestration of technical infrastructure in a short time (AWS, Github, Figma, etc.)

Solidarity-based digital transformation?

A look behind the scenes:

I love it when the media plays “bullshit bingo” — at the end of the day everything is always an alignment of perspective. It sometimes felt like solidarity, because people had a space where they could work on solutions and think together in one direction.

On the other hand: the side of the organizers and the political undertone:

the category dealing with app solutions was taken out of the event because a commercial solution with the RKI was already planned for germany, so all projects were given a kind of “redundancy” stamp or violated the guidelines of the data protection regulation.

Interesting: already “clear” although no projects were visible — how?!

Our project was only minimally affected by this, because primarily in the backend the APIs should comply with the standards. The app was quasi the metaphor — the translation of the defined functionalities. After a small, intensive digital uprising, the issue was finally resolved.

#3 Learning:
There seems to be no lack of political decisions. It should be clarified in advance which projects may later be presented to the committee and which challenges and rules must be met.

What have we done?

In the 48 hours we worked out “the flow”, starting with the verification | registration up to the active use. The goal: a global modular framework, which can also be adapted for countries | institutions and devices. In the end, it was the combinable features that convinced us how:

#Accessability: Extensible networks

Network structure between people with / without illness
Involvement of institutes from the health sector, hospitals, doctors, research institutions for the development of new studies, surveys and research
Adaptation to worldwide restrictions (technical restrictions | data protection regulations|…) , through various pairing methods: Bluetooth, Wlan, GPS, RFID ,…, and QR code logics

#HumanCentricity: Global Information Exchange

Direct risk reporting through anonymous stakeholder networking
“Datadriven” development for internal and external analyses
modular-dynamically generated interfaces adapted to the situation and environment of the users

#Datasecure: Storage of anonymized data

Manual and automatic tracking of visited locations — Anonymized network with risk & potential data delivery

The team dynamic:

For the exchange with the team we used MIRO (storymapping, planning, …) in combination with FIGMA for the prototype and commentary exchange.

Through small online brainstorming sessions of 20 minutes, “Cases & Feature Design” could be quickly discussed with the development team. Parallel to this, already functioning terminals have been programmed and prepared, so that the demo instance could already handle “real” data.

Learning:
Being the only designer working with 7 people and your ideas requires a clear backlog and prioritization logic so that only final ideas are communicated.

Biggest challenge : Target group | users | beneficiaries

The framework had to satisfy several stakeholders and formed the challenge of their everyday life and dealing with the virus:

Humans who should use the app and fill it with data sets to protect themselves and others in the future
Hospitals as interface and validation authority to transmit infections to the system and to detect infection chains faster
Institutions for analyses and anonymised data, for “data-driven” research and insight generation
Federal Government Germany with protected sources of information and depending on the benefit of the population, it wants a functioning society without economic damage

On the last day it became clear that we had missed to get a “mentor” in the team. Through Christian Puell -> T. E. Shaw joined the team. He helped us to make up for the hackathon requirements. This included a 60 second pitch video and an online website to present the project at 18:00. Top the bet was won. Actually super cool, they organized a techno-corona-concert with DJ Quentin Ravn . Of course the end of the hackathon is not theend for this project. So I worked voluntarily until July on the two projects which resulted from the hackathon for me, check out the results here:

“Ohio-APP” alias PATHCHECK: in cooperation with the University of Kiel & IBM and Tjark Ziehm. Check it out in the AppStore https://pathcheck.org/
Survey App “Access” with university Notthingham
Githup: https://github.com/OneTrackingFramework/survey-service/commit/82ac88af08b0fad2f7818c6087fdaf4036335bf9
Sneak: https://marvelapp.com/prototype/4ggje6h/screen/69509095

btw…20.000 People make a mess — ever thought about the limit of Icons in slack?

Toolsharing – what to use

#hackathon #wirvsvirus #sandykauer #camiliero #contenporaryconcept #global #femalesunderstandcode #openapi #framework #servicedesign

P.s.: The nationwide hackathon #WirvsVirus was a joint event of the German government, Tech4Germany,Code for Germany, Initiative D21,Impact Hub Berlin,ProjectTogether,Prototype Fundand SEND e.V., Federal Chancellery and Digitalrat.