Crisis needs community, or as the old saying goes: we hang together or we'll surely hang separately. Whether it's a viral epidemic or climate change, the quality of our response to a societal crisis depends on the strength and depth of our communities: their capacity for compassion, for adaptive leadership and the resources they bring to the problem.

<aside> 💡 There's an alternative: let the state take charge. That might be a good solution in countries such as China where the state's legitimacy as an unchallenged power is closely linked to its effectiveness (real or perceived) at addressing systemic challenges. It's not clear India has that kind of state capacity - instead civil society will have to work closely with the state apparatus to ensure there isn't a massive human catastrophe, either because of the crisis itself or its aftermath. In any case, people want to help and building their capacity to do so is a good idea independent of the services that formal institutions are tasked with delivering.

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Which is why the outpouring of volunteer and nongovernmental activity during the COVID19 is heartening. From volunteers distributing necessities to those in need to crowdsourcing data on the course of the disease, citizens are coming together in amazingly creative ways. But the crisis will stretch across months - perhaps years - well after those of us with salaries return to their jobs or find a new one. In contrast, millions of migrant labourers may never be able to go back to the already constrained opportunities they had.

We need the stamina and the organization to stay the course. That's where Public Problem Solving (PPS) can help aggregate our talents and wisdom.

<aside> 💡 Public Problem Solving: The self-organized, coordinated, open and democratic delivery of goods in the public interest.

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Each one of these qualifiers serves a special purpose:

1. Self-organized: as in emerging bottom-up from individuals and institutions on the ground rather than mandated by the state. A group of doctors and engineers figuring out how to test people on the cheap is self-organization while the health ministry procuring masks is not.
2. Coordinated: a small citizen's group will do well to focus on delivering one service (say, distributing food to elderly citizens living alone without family) but a crisis needs and demands change by the day. The same elderly citizens may also have to be transported to a hospital. It's important that small teams work closely with others who provide complementary services and create a common pool of information that helps the care system as a whole.
3. Open: Normally, organizations have an agenda on which they work in isolation. If I am running a school, I spend my days teaching students and only peripherally concern myself with what's happening in other schools. In a crisis, we have to come together to solve problems as a community in contact with other communities. Schools might have to combine their resources in order to create and launch online learning solutions for their students and share best practices on what learning models work best.
4. Democratic: It's not enough to deliver public services but to respect the dignity of those who are being so provided. Further, communities banding together to address the needs of fellow citizens act as an assertion of democratic rights and helps check the state's unchecked increase in power that comes along with any crisis.

The COVID19 crisis gives us an opportunity to build a platform for PPS that will be needed on many other occasions in the turbulent 21st century.

Public Problem Solving seeks to change the world, not just study it.

Which means that PPS looks for models that give us a handle on transforming the world, i.e., cognitive toolkits.