In March 2020, someone started a Facebook group for makers who wanted to help with the PPE shortage. I joined because I knew how to organize people online.
Within a week, there were thousands of us. Within a month, we had figured out how to vet designs, coordinate manufacturing, and ship supplies to hospitals. We were in basements and garages and makerspaces around the world, running 3D printers and sewing machines.
This is the story of what I learned.
The First 72 Hours
The group grew faster than anyone expected. By the time I joined, there were already heated debates about which face shield design was best, whether 3D-printed masks were safe, and how to get supplies to hospitals that needed them.
The Scale
Within the first week, the group had grown to over 50,000 members. By the end of the month, we had chapters in 60 countries.
The chaos was overwhelming. But underneath it, something remarkable was happening: strangers were figuring out how to trust each other.
The Coordination Problem
The hardest part wasn't the making. People knew how to run 3D printers. They knew how to sew. The hard part was everything else.
How do you verify that a design is actually safe? How do you match makers with hospitals? How do you ship supplies across state lines during a pandemic? How do you prevent well-meaning people from accidentally making things worse?
“The coordination problem is solvable. The trust problem is harder. But when you get both right, ordinary people can do extraordinary things.
We built systems for all of it. Design review boards. Regional coordinators. Logistics networks. Quality control protocols. None of it was elegant. All of it worked.
What I Learned About Trust
The most surprising thing was how quickly trust formed. People who had never met were shipping thousands of dollars worth of supplies to each other based on nothing but a Facebook profile and a shared sense of urgency.
This shouldn't have worked. Every instinct says it shouldn't have worked. But it did.
I think it's because the stakes were clear. When a nurse posts that her hospital is out of face shields, and you have a 3D printer in your garage, the calculation is simple. You help.
The Institutions
The relationship with institutions was complicated. Hospitals needed supplies but couldn't officially accept donations from random Facebook groups. The FDA had regulations that made sense in normal times but created barriers during a crisis. Local governments wanted to help but didn't know how.
The Tension
We were moving faster than institutions could adapt. Sometimes that was good. Sometimes it created problems. Learning to navigate that tension was one of the hardest parts.
We learned to work with institutions rather than around them. We got designs certified. We partnered with established nonprofits. We built relationships with hospital administrators who could vouch for us.
The Scale
By the time things stabilized, the network had shipped tens of millions of supplies to healthcare workers around the world. We had raised $1M, backed by the Schmidt Foundation. We had been featured in TIME Magazine.
But the numbers aren't the interesting part.
The interesting part is what it proved: that a distributed network of strangers, connected only by the internet and a shared sense of purpose, could move faster and more effectively than anyone expected.
What Happens When You Remove the Barriers
I keep coming back to this question: what happens when you remove the barriers between people who want to help and the help that's needed?
The answer, it turns out, is that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Not because they're special, but because the barriers were always the problem.
“The barriers aren't protecting us. They're just slowing us down.
This doesn't mean all barriers are bad. Some exist for good reasons. But many exist simply because no one has questioned them. And in a crisis, you learn very quickly which barriers matter and which ones don't.
After
Open Source Medical Supplies still exists. The network is smaller now, but it's still there. The relationships we built, the systems we created, the trust we established—all of it persists.
I think about OSMS often. Not because of what we accomplished, but because of what it taught me about what's possible.
When people ask me why I spend so much time thinking about communities and coordination, this is why. Because I've seen what happens when you get it right.
And I want to see it happen again.
