This morning The Coworking Library team announced a digital ‘gift’ we have been preparing for to the humans, communities and businesses affected by the economic turbulence that COVID-19 is kicking up around the world.
Today we announce the public beta launch of crisis.directory
Or crisisdirectory.com for those who prefer good ol’ traditional domain names.
This crowdsourced directory is designed to enable community members, organizations (and anyone in the know) to share resources that could financially assist others during economic uncertainty that is rapidly following the current health crisis anywhere in the world.
The idea (much like that of the Coworking Library itself) is to make it easier for people to find and discuss available resources through a powerful indexing and search platform. By inviting the community to leave comments (and soon ratings) on resources, the project aims to better help others in understanding what they can expect from each application process or resource details.
Users who share resources can enable ‘public thanks mode’ for each resource, which adds a link (with full SEO juice enabled) back to their own personal or organization’s website. A neat little way for us to say thanks to those who take the time to find and share resources with the rest of the community.
As this is a public platform, and will remain free-forever, we’re hoping that this will also make it easier to get the information people need, without having to dive into one of those 100+ shared spreadsheets we keep seeing passed around online groups.
I look forward to seeing the directory help freelancers, the self-employed, gig-economy workers, students, business operators, the unemployed and employees in finding the resources they need during and after this global pandemic.