“While one of us was finishing his workout, the other was checking on what had happened in Slack while he’d been swimming.”
, who research viral infections at the University of Wisconsin. O’Connor and Friedrich formed a Slack channel on Jan. 22 to coordinate coronavirus research with scientists worldwide. The conversation has been transcribed and edited for clarity by Chloe Hadavas.On Jan. 22, I was in Cape Town. Over the course of the day, while the impeachment trial was dominating U.S. news, the coronavirus was starting to dominate news coverage overseas.
That led to a few initial direct messages in Slack between five or six of us at UW–Madison, where we identified the scientists we would bring together. Before I went to bed, I created the Slack channel—it’s a channel inside a Slack that we use for our labs at UW–Madison, but we can invite scientists from outside of the university to participate. At that point, we named it the “Wu-han Clan.” .
Jan. 22 was the first day I taught in the UW–Madison spring semester. It was a regular day—I noted administrative stuff I had to respond to later on Slack and email. At noon, I had my first meeting for a graduate-level course on how to give a scientific presentation. Class ended at 1 p.m., and immediately after that I went to another meeting.
We’ve since changed the name of the channel. We originally liked the idea that the Wu-Tang Clan is a collective of artists—something that was founded for mutual support and collaboration—but we’ve learned that names focusing on Wuhan are less appropriate and actually a little stigmatizing. So we’ve changed it for now to “The CoV-Cove,” but that probably won’t stick because none of us really likes it.
It’s not as active as it could be, because we learned during the Zika outbreak that there’s such a thing as a Slack that’s too busy. We’ve tried to make sure people have conversations in threads, and we splintered off all media discussions about the virus into a separate channel. We have a higher signal-to-noise ratio: We focus on meeting announcements, meeting notes, and discussions of actual plans. It’s a little bit more pragmatic and serious and lower traffic than what we had before.
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