TY - JOUR
T1 - Socialized leadership and improvisational responding to COVID-19 supply voids
AU - Clegg, Stewart
AU - Sarkar, Soumodip
AU - Waldman-Brown, Anna
AU - Roy, Raja
N1 - Funding Information:
Within a month of its origin, OSMS was able to evolve from a free-for-all Facebook group to a comprehensive design curation pipeline whose project was to vet and medically approve PPE designs. Its Facebook group developed overnight, refining the governance process over several months. Formal channels took much longer; it took 19 days for the state of Massachusetts to launch a matchmaking platform to provide grants and demand signals to support formal-sector firms in manufacturing PPE for state-wide healthcare facilities and 30 days before signing a contract with a small, non-PPE manufacturer for 1 million medical gowns on April 9, 2020 (Reynolds et al., 2021); by contrast, the OSMS community had already produced 840,177 units of PPE across 900 different facilities by April 10, 2020 (OSMS Facebook tally 2020). OSMS's reported output grew an astounding 653% between week 1 and week 6 of the pandemic. Products ranged from one-offs to small-batch production within makerspaces, to full-scale manufacturing over several months (Cavalcanti et al., 2021). The network's dynamism was evident in the rapid transition of products such as face shields from slapdash, taped-together plastic bottles to safer and sturdier 3D printable shields that could be printed 10 in a day on a single printer; to laser-cut models that could be produced several times faster than 3D printed models; to injection-mouldable designs manufactured in their thousands across small and medium factories (Pineda et al., 2021).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors
PY - 2023/12
Y1 - 2023/12
N2 - A centrally initiated but collectively improvised voluntary network of disaggregated actors, professionals and non-professionals spread across the globe, in an example of socialized leadership in the form of Open Source Medical Supplies (OSMS). Drawn globally from universities, governments, firms and individuals, OSMS, was a digitally networked project platform to remedy medical supply shortages through the ethos of peer production. We demonstrate how such a globally distributed, but digitally interconnected, network can improvise solutions to grand challenges such as COVID-19. From a practical standpoint, our study offers invaluable insights on effectively mobilizing distributed communities to initiate swift, purposeful projects to mitigate disruptive crises. The dual focus on a central digital platform and its role in facilitating numerous localized, globally distributed initiatives, provides key learning for future responses to widespread issues, such as the PPE shortages witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
AB - A centrally initiated but collectively improvised voluntary network of disaggregated actors, professionals and non-professionals spread across the globe, in an example of socialized leadership in the form of Open Source Medical Supplies (OSMS). Drawn globally from universities, governments, firms and individuals, OSMS, was a digitally networked project platform to remedy medical supply shortages through the ethos of peer production. We demonstrate how such a globally distributed, but digitally interconnected, network can improvise solutions to grand challenges such as COVID-19. From a practical standpoint, our study offers invaluable insights on effectively mobilizing distributed communities to initiate swift, purposeful projects to mitigate disruptive crises. The dual focus on a central digital platform and its role in facilitating numerous localized, globally distributed initiatives, provides key learning for future responses to widespread issues, such as the PPE shortages witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
KW - Actor network
KW - COVID-19
KW - Improvisation
KW - Peer production
KW - Socialized leadership
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U2 - 10.1016/j.plas.2023.100088
DO - 10.1016/j.plas.2023.100088
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85163963971
SN - 2666-7215
VL - 4
JO - Project Leadership and Society
JF - Project Leadership and Society
M1 - 100088
ER -