As the novel coronavirus and COVID-19 present unprecedented challenges to communities here and around the world, business leaders in the tech sector from San Jose to Santa Cruz to China are tooling up. In doing so, they are weaponizing social networks and other Silicon Valley-built tools.

As frequently happens in the tech-business world, a campaign in Santa Cruz began with a conversation on LinkedIn and soon leaped over the hill to include partners in San Jose.

Chris Frost, director of technology and infrastructure at Cruzio Internet, says his boss, co-founder and CTO Chris Neklason, wrote in a March 13 post that should local schools move classes online, techies should “consider getting in touch with the local County Office of Education or school district office and ask what they need to keep the kids at home learning.”

Chris Miller, founder and CEO of the web-development company Launch Brigade and the business consultancy Cloud Brigade, saw the post and got straight to work. He came up with a name—Cruz One—secured a domain (http://cruz.one), and built a website to help Santa Cruz County’s educational system facilitate remote learning by providing technology support for teachers and students.

Cruz One will use the services of the San Jose-based video- and web-conferencing company Zoom to connect teachers and students. Esther Yoon, a product marketer at Zoom, helped coordinate on logistics with her colleagues. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan had announced days earlier that the company, which is seeing a huge surge in downloads in the wake of the pandemic, was removing the time limits on its free service for K-12 students.

Yoon and Jason Borgen of the Santa Cruz County Office of Education (COE) worked together on March 17 to organize a virtual training session for teachers that she calls “a comprehensive guide to educating via Zoom.” It will include a Q&A and a virtual poll to learn teachers’ pain-points.

Some teachers might need some training, Frost says, on how to keep students engaged online. “It’s hard enough to keep students engaged when they’re six feet away,” he says, “much more so when they’re out on the edge of a webinar and there’s a gaming console within reach.”

As of March 17, Cruz One had a virtual help desk set up and staffed with 24 volunteers. That morning, Borgen pinged in to say one of his districts had 10,000 Chromebooks that needed to be prepped and disinfected before being distributed to students; two truckloads of Cruzio employees were dispatched to attend to the task.

Borgen says he is working with Cruzio to help fix one of the COE’s biggest challenges: the lack of internet service in the county’s poorest areas. Santa Clara County Superintendent of Schools Mary Ann Dewan says districts in her jurisdiction face the same problem. Dewan points to “a wide disparity in terms of accessibility to the internet in many segments of the county,” including parts of San Jose.

While some teachers will immediately adjust to teaching via webinar, video, and take-home information packets, there is almost certainly a shortage of expertise in that area as well.

“The suddenness and the shifting guidance meant we didn’t have adequate time to prepare for long-term remote learning,” Dewan says, adding that she would welcome help from a local alliance similar to Cruz One. “We would love to have eager partners, and I know our families would appreciate it.”

Speaking for herself and not her company, Yoon says she believes the tools being developed in Santa Cruz this week—a distributed volunteer tech-support team for educators, as well as a couple of delivery platforms—might very well work in every community that is being impacted by the pandemic.

“There’s a model being tested here that could scale across the world,” Yoon says.

Global business model

Peter Leroe-Munoz, general counsel for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, says Zoom is joined by many other fellow SVLG members in stepping up to help in this time of global challenge.

“We’re seeing our member companies display real global citizenship,” Leroe-Munoz says. “In addition to making financial donations here and in China and Italy, we’re seeing them becoming actively involved in trying to find solutions. Zoom is a good example; it’s encouraging to see how its service is allowing people to stay connected in the face of an event that is dramatically changing how people function.”

Leroe-Munoz also points out that Johnson & Johnson, an SVLG member with offices in Milpitas and Menlo Park, has sent a small army of biotech experts to China to combat the virus.

Neklason says the tools created in Silicon Valley can provide communities with precisely what they need to combat threats like the novel coronavirus.

“Governments and nonprofits are good for taking care of business as usual,” Neklason says, “but COVID-19 is requiring more of a wartime effort, where the community itself is mobilized. And social networks make that easy. I started with LinkedIn because professional networking makes it so much faster to mobilize.

“We’re seeing all of the social networks come through—citizens stepping up and activating their networks to help their communities. It’s making me feel a little bit better about humans.”

Chris Miller is making the code of the Cruz One website available to community groups that can use the help-desk tool to help students in their area. For more information, email ctodd@cloudbrigade.com.

The Santa Clara Office of Education’s Inclusion Support Warmline Service provides educational resources and information about COVID19 and schools. Visit https://www.sccoe.org/news/featured/Pages/Novel-Coronavirus-Information.aspx