Morning Briefing

A daily update

Inspiration

Each morning, when we wake, we make a plan for the day. Under current conditions, this can be slightly more complicated. Wouldn't it be nice to start with an official, Schengen-wide summary of what has changed recently, what conditions exist in which countries, what are the plans for easing quarantines, and how you can safely and appropriately begin to re-engage with your friends and family across the region?

What it does

Morning Briefing provides a summary of EU-wide recommendations, current local conditions, travel restrictions, community guidelines, and other information. It's a simple and honest source of organizational information and agreed upon community standards to help EU citizens make decisions about how they can go about their day and where it is safe and sensible to work, travel, and engage with others.

A word about privacy and trust: We believe it's crucially important that you be provided information that you can trust by the government officials and organizations that are working as hard as possible to help reduce the impact of COVID-19 on all our lives. We will not track any personally identifiable information. We will try to provide anonymized data that will allow you to make sensible choices about how you want to re-engage with those around you. We can't wait (but will, until it can be done sensibly).

How I built it

This is coded in HTML5 and CSS3. It currently comes from various EU sources and a fair amount of basic surfing and scrubbing. We hope that it will begin to provide officially endorsed information from a wide variety of EU organizations. Although there is a temptation in times of challenge and justifiable anxiety to withdraw within ourselves, it's through our actions together that we will be able to more quickly address the challenges posed by this virus, to develop a vaccine, and to reduce the economic impact it will have on all our lives. Stronger together is both a motto and a truth. The EU is worth fighting for.

Practical issues: the geolocation to an address is relevant to provide local information and current and ongoing conditions. It's device based. We've all chosen to carry these tools around; we might as well make them work for us, not on us. The "Contact Tracing: NO UPDATE" is a place holder. We hope to make it live so that you can know who or what you may have been exposed to and submit that information (if you wish) to public health authorities. It's crucially important to preventing continued infection ar a rebound in cases. But community standards are the work of people in the communities. You will be the one to make the choices and take the steps that will end the current situation. We work on the assumption that you will make the right choice. For yourself and for everyone else.

Please read about contact tracing here. Or here. There's a debate.

Challenges I ran into

In this particular effort, we were all under an incredible time crunch. The people and groups who tried to coordinate everything ran into challenges organizing people. They had difficulty finding and having mentors and coaches be able to provide information to their teams. But, if you stay on the course and keep working at it, fantastic things can be accomplished.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We got a lot done in a very short amount of time. It may not seem that way, but we've gone from a spark to a plan and that's always the hardest first step.