This post will be a short one.

I’m sure many of you would’ve noticed that of late we have been slow in updating certain data points on the site. Some of the state data is delayed until late night or sometimes even the next day. Today I want to talk about the reason(s) for that. I’ve been wanting to write this for at least a couple of weeks now. Finally I’ve gotten around to it. This post talks about more about the human aspects of the project.

As many of you already know, we started off in the month of March. Mid March to be more specific. That puts us into the seventh month of operations. Now these seven months have been very testing. We’ve been as diligent as possible in updating and maintaining the website. However, a lot of us have been caught up with the demands of our daily lives. Whether it is the job we do, or the studies we are involved in. The demands of the daily routines have made us reprioritise things. This certainly is a major reason why some of us aren’t as active as we were before. The effect of this is us not being able to update the site as soon as the bulletins are available.

There’s also a reason that’s not directly related to our professions, but is part of us being humans - fatigue. Seven months is a long time. Seven months of being extra careful about everything we do when we go out (if at all we do) is a stress that none of us have experienced before. Add to it, the ever present responsibility of keeping the data up to date has lead to a mental fatigue that few of us had anticipated. Then there are a multitude of queries and confusions in data that we are asked about - majorly the mismatch of district bulletins to local news handles to central agencies. Since we are collating the data, we see the issues but we know nothing more than you do. After all, all we are doing is to take the state data and show it in a more consumable fashion. A few RTIs filed by some volunteers haven’t yielded any results and it seems like the confusions will remain for now. All these add up to the stress that the volunteers here have to deal with.

On the technical front as well, we face issues that require certain tweaks. Sometimes the format of the state bulletins change. This means that we are required to go and change the code, or at least temporarily change it to get the data from the bulletins. This we usually do late in the nights as sometimes we are busy with our families and other responsibilities.

Overall, the reality is that some of us feel tired. And hence there have been delays in the data updates (sorry about that). We however acknowledge the role we’ve come to play during these times and we plan to continue doing this as long as we can. We appreciate all the support you’ve given us. Please stay safe and take care of your family and friends.

Until we write again,
Stay safe!
Bee.