Tasmania: COVID Exposure Sites Facebook GROUP
THE EXAMINER - Tasmania: COVID Exposure Sites Facebook moderators talk importance of popular group (13 January 2022)
When Wegeena woman Belinda Pelly and City of Launceston councillor Tim Walker started the Tasmania: Community Known Covid Exposure Sites page it was simply to "fill an information void" of missing exposure sites. The page, started two weeks ago when the government stopped listing all exposure sites, now has just shy of 50,000 members and receives request for about 150 posts each day.
Typically, and originally, those posts informed group members about COVID exposure sites in the state, but the group has since passed into different phases and incarnations to become a growing and shifting community aimed at helping others.
After originally filling that void of exposure sites, the group has since become awash with posts from members of the public alerting their community to where they can get rapid antigen tests from, how long the line for those tests might be, or where its easy and quick to get N95 masks.
Recently, group member and recently graduated mechatronics engineer Jordan Peters took the initiative to build a program to aggregate all of the exposure site. Mr Peters, 23 and from Launceston, said he set up the program, which posts exposure sites in an online document, because he saw friends posting their check in information and thought it seemed "time consuming to constantly read through all the screenshots just in case you were at one of the sites".
"I thought if there was a single place with all the data together it would be a lot easier for everyone," he said. Mr Peters said he spent about two to three hours building the program, but had spent at least six hours in total getting it to the point where it automatically updates after group members posted their photo. His voluntary hours of work proved to be typical of group members, in particular those who started the page.
Ms Pelly said she and other moderators, including Boomer Bay woman Jeddah Barwick, spent every hour of the day making sure the right information was shared in a time critical way. There had even been two moderators recruited from overseas to cover moderation during hours most Tasmanians would be asleep.
The volunteer run page, according to Ms Barwick and Cr Walker, was an example of people from the island state banding together in a time of "crisis". Cr Walker said that togetherness had become typical for Northern Tasmanians. "People there want to express care for fellow Tasmanians, and they've found an avenue to do it," he said.