During my data shift, I was responsible for gathering data from five states: NY, MD, AL, KS, and OR. I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is how PRESENT, really, with capital letters, you must be in the moment to do this job. It seems easy since there are so many notes about what to do and where to look for information, but it can be very deceiving if you are not really paying 100% attention. There are so many categories with similar names; it’s easy to get confused and make a mistake. There also categories where you need to make calculations and those are especially deceiving in my opinion — since you can’t type, you really have to rely on yourself to write things correctly and avoid any typos.
By the way, another thing I learned is the importance of not copy-pasting data or using the schedule function to type dates/times — in this case, at least. Amanda French explained to me that they run a lot of programs in the sheet, so you can’t really copy-paste anything or use the schedule function. That was interesting to know.
Also, I touched on that briefly already but I’m impressed with the level of organization of that spreadsheet; it makes everything a lot easier for us checkers. There are easy instructions on where to look for each data and warnings about what can happen. It looks like they already foresaw for you everything that can go wrong and what do about it. I guess that is the only way of making a huge project like this run smoothly.
Another thing that I noted is the sense of community of this whole project. Yes, we are dealing with numbers and working from different places, but during my shift, I actually felt a very strong sense of community and it almost felt as if we were all working together in the same office. Slack works really well in this case, because it’s also organized and people are actually paying attention to it, answering fast to any questions checkers may have. I believe that sense of community is always important, but even more when we are dealing with such a harsh subject — yes, we are discussing numbers, but if we stop to think that each of these numbers is a person, it gets very, very sad and uncomfortable. So it’s nice to have this sense of community and people to talk with during the shift. I think they are doing a great job and that’s why people keep going back to take more turns.