FightPandemics

The global response to COVID-19 has been a disaster. As governments scramble to respond effectively, individuals and organizations are left without the help they need. At the same time, individuals and organizations who are eager to help are met with a fragmented network of labour and resource sharing. As a direct consequence, individuals offering help struggle to reach those who need it most.

FightPandemics is quickly becoming *the* place to get and give help. Our altruistic meta-platform tackles the aforementioned resource-matching problem by connecting those requesting aid with those offering it via a local and global Help Board. The result? An unfragmented system of resource planning and sharing.

At scale, our wealth of data will enable governments, communities, and multinational organizations to make better decisions regarding policy, response, and resource allocation.

We're creating a world we want to see—one that's more resilient to crises.

Join the Fight!

This is neither the first nor the last public health emergency we will face. Despite this, no secure global platform exists to connect those seeking help with those offering it. This leaves individuals, communities, and organizations in a highly fragmented state during crises.

Effective response to global health crisis is dependent on multiple factors, including governmental/institutional alignment and community engagement and response. While it is often possible to find information about national-level resources, it is frustrating, difficult and often frightening to locate and mobilise the critical community-level resources that can alleviate immediate need.

Even when the local-level communications occur, the urgent requests for help and the generous offers of help have multiple challenges finding each other: posting sites deeply fragmented, geographically unmatched, and typically out of date.

This lack of a single platform creates unnecessary challenges and waste in scarce resources at the worst time, during 'the fog of delivery'. These challenges and waste has serious implications for the future of global health security: decision-making, policy development and programmes are significantly less data-driven, further increasing waste and loss for governments, organisations, researchers, communities, local leaders, and most importantly for the populations that depend on them.

To solve inefficient sharing of resources, we have created an altruistic meta-platform, bringing individuals and organizations looking to request or offer help into in one place, with the most user friendly matching process.

Our webapp is a "help board" where organisations or individuals will be able to post localised offers and request help with an expiration date, in order to have relevant content at all times. Users are able to filter the "Help Board" by location (city, state, country, global), by "poster" (individual, traditional company, etc.) and by type of help (groceries/food, medical supplies, education, legal, wellbeing/mental, entertainment, information, funding, R&D, tech and others).

Aiming to be the best solution matching help, we project to grow rapidly, reaching a critical mass of users interacting on the platform. At that point, we enter Phase 2 of our solution, becoming a robust source of information for governments and multi-national organization to utilise for more informed decisions surrounding policies, response plans, and resource allocations.

With our altruistic-meta platform solving the broad need to connect resources, we have a diverse set of target groups. We serve individuals offering help (volunteers, job seekers, investors, donors) or requesting help (e.g. vulnerable people, entrepreneurs). We also serve a wide range of organizations both offering or requesting help (non-profits, local businesses, community groups, corporations).

For all these target groups, we address their core need to effectively and easily connect their resources through our robust meta-platform bringing everyone to one place (solving fragmentation issues) with the best user experience (removing manual barriers).

Our partnerships team is building relationships with our target audiences to better understand them. First, we have 3 mutual aid groups, who will be testing our MVP and sharing their feedback. Our Business Intelligence capabilities within the platform also allows us to assess and understand who our early users are, and how they are using the platform.

Our second stage key target group are the governments and multi-national organizations who we can support with valuable information to fulfill their needs to improve decision making regarding policy, program design, and resource allocation. We aim to build early partnerships with these organizations to ensure we best understand their information needs.

FightPandemics recognises that this won't be our last health crisis. We have witnessed global leaders react to the events which unfolded with the outbreak, the inefficiencies in decision-making and its dire consequences. Communities stepped up for one another (mutual aid groups), and our platform scales their work and that of others, to easily access help and seek volunteering opportunities. The data we will gather can be commissioned to scientific researchers and government members, so that they can be proactive instead of reactive. The insights will help them to understand which communities were the worst affected - and more importantly, why?

There are unquestionably a number of competitors providing similar solutions.

Helpinghands.community is a project that emerged during the pandemic also. We appreciate the work that they're doing, though they coordinate response through information gathered through a form, which we find is manual and cumbersome for those connecting in the background. Their model only targets some states within USA, whereas FP very much wants to focus on enabling global growth from the forefront. Other competitors we have come across are: Pandemic of Love, Coming together Vancouver, QueroAjudar and multiple more local initiatives.

We envision the project growing to uniquely span all four phases of the disaster lifecycle. Namely, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. FP will make communities less vulnerable to future emergencies – a big undertaking that will be actualised through building community strength by enabling vital connections to form. Through data analysis, we will increase response efforts by better understanding what communities truly need, and share real-time accurate information. FP will empower communities with the tools to find stability, and ultimately, improve the ability of local communities to respond to a disaster. We hope to be ahead of the curve, when the next humanitarian disaster strikes.

FP has attracted an immensely talented group from the tech sector. We cherish the innovation of our contributor-base, who have volunteered their time to create a thriving organisation around our core product.

Our platform is currently a webapp and soon a native app powered by many different centralized solutions:

• AWS is used for deployment and cloud computing.
• MongoDB is where our database is being stored.
• Google Maps API is being used for attaching a location to each post, profile and for search.
• Auth0 is being used for authentication of users with social medial.
• Localise is a tool that is enabling the translation of our product to over 20 languages.
• Sentry, Zendesk, Papertrail, Pagerduty and Datadog are being used for monitoring issues and have a more resilient platform.
• Slack, Github, Notion, Figma and Canva are tools used internally for communication and collaboration between all the contributors.

In the very short term, we will be adding modules for donations using different centralized (Paypal, Stripe, Venmo...) and decentralized (bitcoin, ethereum, DAI) solutions, we will also improving search by using machine learning (Algolia, Elastic or others) in order to be able to prioritize requests or offers that are relevant to each user type. We are at the same time exploring the use of decentralized protocols (IPFS, Arweave.org, Interledger and others) for having a more resilient platform.

We are launching our webapp in the upcoming days, and we don't have any users at the moment but we have already partnered up with mutual aid groups that have over 42,000 members. Our infrastructure, enables to scale up automatically with traffic. The web server is horizontally scaled up (i.e. more instances of the server are added) based on its CPU utilization (which goes up proportionally with traffic). Also, the MongoDB Atlas cluster scales up vertically (i.e. the hardware of the cluster instances are boosted automatically) based on its memory/CPU utilization: https://docs.atlas.mongodb.com/cluster-autoscaling/

Market/Matching barriers:

1. Building individual user base in the Offer Community. There may be other platforms that seek to capture these offers.
2. Building organisational user base in the Offer Community. Some organisations may fear brand dilution if positioned alongside other similar organisations, causing them to increase competition for both funding and service delivery.

Financial barriers:

1. Our current workforce is operates without any financial compensation. Over time, there will be a need to remunerate existing workforce.
2. Slow growth in revenue generation from commissioning insights. Some governments and NGOs may be hindered by political will or concerns, or under-value the data. FP's fee-per-match revenue model may not be widely accepted by users.

Partnership/Client barriers:

1. We will need to demonstrate value to the governments and clients prior to formalising agreements, which requires time investment and know-how in each sector.
2. Liability and regulatory. We expect there will be legal hurdles and geography-based regulatory regimes that will each have differing allowances and requirements.

Currently, we aren't serving anyone as we haven't launched it. Our partners have been supporting us with our research efforts and estimate that we could have 1-2m users by the end of this year based on similar projects that they are support. As we are launching an altruistic platform globally, we are confident in our abilities to attain this userbase. In 5 years' time, we hope to have reached 500 Million users, of course this could vary if other health crises occur during this period.

Our marketing strategy is based on growing organically through spider-webbing our reach to users, through our social media strategy and ambassador reach. We conducted research which benchmarked our launch and growth with LinkedIn, who also embrased the six degrees of separation.

End of the year:

• 1 million users.
• Partnerships with mutual aid groups and initiatives (grow data collection, analysis techniques become more sophisticated).
• Build partnerships with local government, to support revenue model and nurture relationship for future ambitions.
• Scaling with 100 ambassadors to advocate the benefits of out service to their communities and audience.
• Funds raised to support annual growth ambitions wrt product development

5 years:

• Worldwide go-to-platform to facilitate support networks and sharing of insights
• 500M users, sustainable business model
• Partnership with multiple governments and multinational organizations like the WHO, UN, and Philanthropists.

Market/Matching barriers:

1. Building individual user base in the Offer Community. There may be other platforms that seek to capture these offers.
2. Building organisational user base in the Offer Community. Some organisations may fear brand dilution if positioned alongside other similar organisations, causing them to increase competition for both funding and service delivery.

Financial barriers:

1. Our current workforce is operates without any financial compensation. Over time, there will be a need to remunerate existing workforce.
2. Slow growth in revenue generation from commissioning insights. Some governments and NGOs may be hindered by political will or concerns, or under-value the data.

Partnership/Client barriers:

1. We will need to demonstrate value to the governments and clients prior to formalising agreements, which requires time investment and know-how in each sector.
2. Liability and regulatory. We expect there will be legal hurdles and geography-based regulatory regimes that will each have differing allowances and requirements.

For the market barriers FP will conduct 5 pilots, varying geography, type of help addressed, and type of Offer Community organisation (individual, mutual aid group, non-profit). As this will be our first go-to-market exposure, we will speak directly with individuals/organisations to understand their drivers, user experience, and FP's opportunities to modify.

For financial barriers, we need some seed money to assure that we have a sustainable team for a minimum of two years. In addition, we will need to experiment with multiple revenue models and need an adequate volume of matches to demonstrate our capabilities.

For partnership/client barriers, we need sector experience and corporate/institutional contacts that will allow us to build high-value, high-trust relationships that will, over time, enable influence and change. For the variety of regulatory regimes, we need guidance on how much review is enough, without under- or over-investing.

• 200+ active contributors, 500+ volunteers And over 2000+ applications to join our movement.
• Around 5 full-time, 20 contributing 20-35 hours per week, 175 contributing 10-20+ hours a week

One thing that makes our team special is that we currently operate on a purely volunteer basis, quality controlled through a curated onboarding process. The idea is that we get the best thinking on this giant problem, combine it with a willingness to collaborate on a shared solution, while working together with a shared ethos. Ego is very low; appreciation commitment is very high.

This approach allows us to currently secure the blend of skills and drive that give us a strong start in FightPandemics for these key functions:

Founder Evangelist Manuel Gonzalez Alzuru, whose powerful vision we are bringing to life. Manuel has experience in launching ventures in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Those include centralized marketplaces, digital products that empower people, increase financial inclusion, increase decentralization and experiment with new digital organizations with co-ownership.

For the a back-end, front-end and user experience that is positive flexible, robust and scaleable, we have team members who have had experience with in Google.org, Amazon, Toyota, Goldman Sachs, Yahoo, Tesla, Rocket Internet and Deloitte.

From the healthcare perspective we currently have nurses, healthcare workers and doctor family members who are working on the frontline of Covid-19 response.

To achieve the global reach, we have developed a strong partnerships, business development and marketing team, with a track record in digital techniques, building institutional and corporate relationships and brands, and robust commercial knowledge.

Tech Partners: Numerous solutions have provided free access to use their tools including:

• Airtable PRO [1 year]
• Algolia PRO [Lifetime]
• AWS [Credit: $7500]
• Auth0 [Credit: 1M users]
• Figma Organization [6 months]
• Gitkraken [1 year]
• Google Maps API [Credit: $2500]
• Hackolade [Lifetime]
• Leypal [Lifetime]
• MongoDB [6 months]
• Notion PRO plan [1 year]
• Sendgrid [1 year]
• Sentry [Lifetime]
• Slack PRO [6 months]
• Twilio [1 year]
• Typeform PRO [6 months]
• Zeplin [1 year]
• Zendesk [6 months]

Strategic Partnerships: 3 Mutual Aid groups in Toronto, Montreal, and London have agreed to share/ promote our platform to their members (42,000) and test our first prototype version. The early interest from these groups to work with us is a positive sign that their current processes of faciliting help for their members are ineffecient and they are interested in exploring other solutions.

We provide an impactful platform that facilitates individuals (volunteers, job seekers, investors, donors) or organisations (governments, non-profits, communities, startups, corporations, local businesses) to source or offer help. This could be in the form of groceries, medical supplies, funding (from investors, donors, grants), education, legal, wellbeing / mental health, entertainment, information, R&D and tech. Our revenue stream will be formed of two segments.

1. We will take a small portion from paid services, which will be reinvested into the platform, benefiting the very people who use FP to gain customers and showcase their services.

2. Local government partnerships (and philanthropists); each time an individual benefits from our service (i.e. they successfully receive help), using the Interledger Protocol, we will automatically receive a small sum of money e.g. $0.10, for example. So the more we can facilitate support, the more funding we gain, and the more we can reinvest in improving the service — to ultimately benefit humans across the globe. This will create a network effect that will ultimately strengthen communities, and alleviate the pressure placed upon governments to support those in need (while also juggling many other priorities). 

We have been able to reach this stage ready to launch our prototype entirely with unpaid volunteers and tech sponsorships providing subscriptions to the necessary tools.

However, we will soon need funds to accelerate product development and boost marketing and user acquisition efforts.

The first sources of funds we are targeting are accelerator programs, challenges, and non-profits/grants that align most closely with our purpose. Secondarily, we will consider, impact investors (HNWs) and venture capital. These sources all pose great opportunity to gain mentorship and reach that will be of utmost value, also.

We also intend to start generating revenues through commission on the paid services on the platform as soon as this fall.

In the meantime, we will integrate Web Monetization and Interledger technologies in our upcoming platform upgrades to enable our long term sustainable business model.

The benefits of working with Solve will be enormous for FP and our team. We highlight four here to help us to the next stage of growth:

• Support for rapid building of Offering Community, so that we can alleviate small and large areas of human suffering, now. We need the ideas, exposure and access that Solve can offer.
• Validation and expansion of viable business models. FP intends to have a powerful impact on individuals right now as well as the sustained global health security. FP needs help to find ways in to influence the drivers and patterns of institutional decision-making and resource allocation.
• A view on opportunities for strategic partnerships. What are we missing? How can we fine-tune FP's USP while it helps individuals and community organisations secure the help and express the generosity it has to offer.
• Organisational growth and leadership excellence: FP began 5 months so as an idea, a frustration, of one person. It is now 125 to 400 active contributors on any one day, each agreeing to work together each day with a certain ethos. What does exceptional leadership, across our virtual organisation, look like in this setting? How do we enable metamorphosis and growth while we also manage the culture, openness, and diversity with which we have started?

Government representatives, to better undertand the partnership requirements they will have to work with us. Universities (such as MIT and partner universities) within which the R&D networks can work with us to provide advice and insight for the development of our product. Opportunity to work with, and learn from, faculty members like Peter Szolovits, whose background in medical decision making will be both fascinating and insightful to provide a different perspective to our data analysis. Similarly, building a relationship with the behavioural insights team that Christopher Chabris co-leads will give us the opportunity to explore how we can positively influence our users to make decisions with positive outcomes (prioritising their health and quality of life). An interesting — and important — topic FP wants to explore is prioritising the privacy and security of our users' data while truly empowering them. We have no intention of being another technology organisation that profits from their users' private data, rather, our main goal is to use these insights to support health emergencies within the very communities who use our service.