Building Your Team
Whether you are a manufacturer, belong to an existing makerspace, or are a home crafter, you have the power to set up a local response group within your community. Discover groups around you, expand them, or stand up your own!
Finding and Creating Local Response Groups
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues on, more groups all over the globe have sprung up to help their local communities. This section will help you find groups near you, as well as help you think through an effective team structure if you are standing up a new entity.
Search for Existing Efforts
The easiest way to get involved is to find an existing group in your local area where you can contribute your time and efforts. OSMS has partnered with Nation of Makers, Find the Masks, and Fab Foundation to map local response groups and donation efforts all across the world, to make it easy to find a group near you.
- Search for pre-existing groups by exploring the OSMS Local Response Map to see if there are any response efforts working in your area.
- Check local makerspace and FabLab websites and social media feeds for clues. Remember to try a few different location tags, such as major city, county, state or municipality.
- Use social media (Facebook Groups, Twitter, Whatsapp, etc., and Google) to search for your local area, and see if there are already any OSMS or other crafter or maker groups organizing.
Reach Out to the Maker and Crafter Community
Much of the COVID-19 Local Response efforts have originated from within the pre-existing Maker and Crafter communities. If you are in need of locally-manufactured supplies or want to work with maker or crafter groups, first search the Local Response Map for maker and crafter groups in medical supply production near you.
If you are trying to activate production, and you are seeking to galvanize makers and crafters, here are some tips for reaching them:
- Shared tool facilities like makerspaces, FabLabs and hackerspaces have mobilized members and tools, and have been incredible forces for design and production. Note guidelines for safe workplace guidelines for social distancing and for sterile working conditions are being developed (see Resources Links).
- Sewists are more numerous and more distributed as tools are close to portable. Mask making groups have organized across social groups like churches, schools, neighborhoods, and existing friend networks. When reaching out to these groups, note they often have their own individual cultures and ways of operating. In building collaborations with them, it is important to respect the structures they have established and focus on identifying and communicating the value that you are able to provide to them, rather than on attempting to change their overall structures and operational models. This value could be access to included designs, materials, or supplies such as 3D printed bias tape makers.
- Many universities have prototyping facilities in engineering and design departments.
- Some helpful indexes for finding these organizations:
Look for National Organizations
Some countries have organized to the extent that they have national coordination. OSMS has studied how maker communities of different countries individually responded to the crisis. We explored how they solved problems specific to their geography and other factors, and deliver the insights in the form of individual case studies vetted for accuracy by the respective national maker communities and organizations. If you are from these countries or want to learn from their organizing structures, reading these case studies will be a valuable orientation:
Create Your Own Organization
If no group exists in your area, you can always create your own! Keep the following in mind as you begin to process your ideas:
- Secure teammates to launch the group with you. Review the Functions, Roles and Responsibilities section below for the kind of talent you are looking for.
- When choosing your geographic area of focus, think regionally. A state or country is likely too large to serve for a new organization. On the other hand, a small town might not have enough people to support the level of involvement needed. Also, consider any current travel restrictions that may limit the movement of raw material inputs to production sites to organizations in need— such restrictions may create a boundary for your region.
- If you want to, leverage the OSMS brand. When creating a group, please name it “Open Source Medical Supplies – [Your Geographic Area].” Please see the simple OSMS Brand Guide to help you create a logo.
- Please help us follow your work and “register” your group. You can register with us by completing this survey. Registration will add your group to the OSMS Local Response Map and connect you into the communication channels of Local Response groups working all over the globe. Read more about the benefits of joining the OSMS Local Response Network.
Build Your Team
Composition of each organization will be informed by local circumstances as well as number of volunteers, talents and resources available. Your organization may be focused on one product but coordinating hundreds of volunteers. Or your organization might be coordinating production across different groups, each of whom is focused on one product (e.g. face shields, gowns and masks).
As you build your team, we recommend that critical roles be doubled or overlapping in case of illness or other disruptions. As this crisis impacts more and more people personally, individual capacity will fluctuate. Plan for this ahead of time and build in both redundancy and clear channels for communication.
If you are an existing organization (especially a makerspace) pivoting to a medical supply making effort, review the OSMS document Making Medical Supplies Sustainably for more in-depth guidance.
Functions, Roles, and Responsibilities
This proposed staffing model is not a one-size-fits-all model; this a starting point for tasks your group will likely encounter. In most organizations, people work across multiple roles. As your group grows, you can recruit additional people to take on tasks based on their relevant skills and connections, and roles can become more specialized. Each local response group will be composed differently; consider these “job descriptions” to be prompts for thinking through how you might staff leadership for your effort.
Local Response Leadership
Primary Role: Networking, managing and motivating volunteers, and thinking and acting strategically.
Secondary Role: Activate the community and amplify the work.
- Identify and connect with any organizations and individuals already running making and distribution efforts, and share information with other groups to increase combined efficiency.
- Look for opportunities to promote efforts and build capacity. Fill the gaps in materials supply, volunteers, etc.
- Connect the dots! Make connections to accelerate individual contributions.
- Instigate making and manufacturing efforts (e.g. isolation gowns production) where there is none.
- Participate via Open Source COVID-19 Medical Supplies Facebook Group, as well as OSMS Slack and private Local Response Facebook Group. Take advantage of the collective intelligence of the OSMS community. Ask questions! Give back by sharing your group’s successes, learnings and epiphanies.
Tertiary Role: Build the team
- Help to set an inclusive culture and respectful, collaborative environment.
- Model self-care and help team members set boundaries and curb burnout.
- Decide if the organization is able to create paid staff positions or if the workforce will be entirely volunteer-driven. Consider that volunteers who are currently not working may have to return to jobs once they become available or if money becomes an issue. Plan accordingly for their position to be covered should the need for them to leave arise quickly.
Technical Project Management
Primary Role: Distribute plans design files and activate makers/professional fabricators.
- Match local needs to available designs (see the OSMS Project Library) and local capacity for producing them.
- Funnel information about products (“what to make”) to manufacturers and makers in your network.
- Design production workflows and management tools for a distributed workforce. More on this in Outreach Guidance – Makers and Manufacturing.
- Be a resource for resolving technical design and production issues.
- Source suppliers and donors of materials.
- Contribute feedback about implementation, design iterations, and other information to the Open Source COVID-19 Medical Supplies Facebook group and community.
Hospital Relations
Primary Role: Develop and maintain trusted relationships with healthcare facilities. Medical industry experience helps, but anyone with a talent for cold-calling and internet research can do it.
- Make and document contacts with hospitals and other providers.
- Determine needs, acceptable products, and coordinate delivery.
- Build trust and relationships with administrators, staff, and procurement agents (procurement staff are professionals that manage all purchasing and vendor relationships for PPE and devices).
- Be conscious that some hospital workers have experienced formal reprimands and even termination for sourcing PPE. Be discreet about your relationships with the medical community.
- Share OSMS information such as the Care Guides and Project Library as appropriate.
- Please refer to the “Hospitals” section of the Outreach Guidance section of this guide for more detailed information on strategy and best practices.
Healthcare, Labor, and Social Services Relations
Primary Role: Look for service and partnership opportunities with labor unions (healthcare, retail, nurses, teacher, etc), city and social services, and non-profit groups.
- Make and document contacts with healthcare, labor unions, social service and non-profit community service providers.
- Determine needs, acceptable products, and coordinate delivery.
- Build trust and relationships; cultivate opportunities for collaboration.
- Please refer to the Outreach Guidance section of this guide for more detailed information on strategy and best practices.
Manufacturer Relations
Primary Role: Develop and maintain trusted relationships with local manufacturers. This work is a good fit for people already working in local product development and manufacturing. However, like medical relations, this work can also be accomplished through sheer persistence.
- Identify local manufacturers that have capacity and interest to scale production by leveraging injection molding and other manufacturing processes.
- Connect manufacturers with raw materials, tooling, engineers and designs.
- Please refer to the Outreach Guidance section of this guide for more detailed information on strategy and best practices.
Community Management
Primary Role: Manage community of volunteers. Strong customer-service and social media skills are key to these tasks. Good judgement, positivity, and ability to recognize and communicate trends is key to helping the other organizers “keep an ear to the ground.”
- Manage public and private forums to drive engagement with and capacity of the organization (e.g. Facebook Groups, WhatsApp Groups, Discord, Slack Channels, Google Groups).
- Help filter “signal” from “noise” so that team members can work together more effectively and not get distracted.
- Develop onboarding protocols to best manage influx of new members.
- Actively recruit partnerships and bring in new volunteers.
- A large local network (personal or professional) is useful for this.
- Screen incoming members and refer people with high-level connections or specialized skills to relevant point people within local organization.
- Gather information about people’s skills, backgrounds, and interests to determine who will be strategically useful, who is seeking assistance, etc.
- Create a channel or culture of people introducing themselves as they are added to the community forum, encouraging them to share their background, specialties, interests, efforts etc.
- Another mechanism for learning about the team is to ask people to complete a private “census” form that will create a roster of professions and skill sets as fast as possible without reviewing individual, typed responses. Do not share census information publicly (see Information Security).
Government Relations
Primary Role: Develop and maintain trusted relationships with local government officials. Individuals with existing relationships and/or a lobbying or community organizing background are useful, as they often already have access to elected officials and administrators. However, beware of politics – newcomers without baggage from other interactions or issues can be just as effective.
- Stay informed of public messaging from government officials.
- Follow social media feeds of local and regional officials.
- Identify emergency response committees or agencies tasked with coordinating government COVID-19 efforts.
- Be aware of changes in policies around emergency provisions for medical supplies from government agencies. In the United States, for example, The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that created more local authority for medical officials when sourcing medical supplies.
- Build relationships with city and regional administrators/staff (public health department, social services, emergency services, etc).
- Initially, invest your energies locally rather than trying to reach too high up in politics unless you have pre-existing relationships.
- Ask for introductions to healthcare worker unions, manufacturing networks, and other resources that government officials have easy access to.
Marketing and Media Relations
Primary Role: Build awareness to the general public for your group’s efforts. Attract and celebrate partners, provide mechanisms for volunteers to engage, connect to the press, etc.
- Create a website and social media accounts for your group.
- Design branding & visual collateral.
- Produce videos and photography about your organization’s work and mission.
- Pitch media for coverage (local blogs, papers, news, etc).
- Look for news stories related to your group’s mission and reach out to those reporters to make a connection.
- Develop calls to action and story pitches to be shared with local media.
- Communicate back with the OSMS media team if you need help, or want to coordinate with the global organization.
- Prepare for interviews and conversations with the media, have a solid and concise “elevator pitch,” and stay on message during interviews.
- It is important not to over-promise fabrication capacity, or to misrepresent the nature of the group. Do not let them assume you are a company providing fixed numbers of units.
- Be mindful that many of the supplies being worked on (particularly devices such as ventilators) are subject to extensive government regulations and that the legal issues surrounding this work are complex. Claiming a ventilator you are working on will go into a hospital that has not approved of it will damage your reputation.
- Be aware of standard procedures when interacting with media, including the technical meanings of speaking “on the record,” “on background,” and other issues around privacy and attribution. (A quick introduction to these issues can be found here.)
- Be conscious that some healthcare workers are experiencing formal reprimands and even termination for independently sourcing PPE. Do not disclose your relationships to those within the medical community without their prior consent.