Coronavirus:

A Call to the Internet Giants for Meaningful Help

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, e-bay, Facebook and the rest, it’s time to step up and put the power of the internet to work for local communities as effectively as it has worked in the other aspects of our lives.

Every local community, the smallest area that the locals would recognise as their community, needs a platform as a point of focus for all sorts of things. As one example, think how do we use all local restaurants to provide meals to all people self-isolating, or how do we pool local food stocks across all stores to meet demand? Governments, commercial c ompanies, and the existing local community organisations are not best placed to do this...

But, You guys are!

You have amazing people and experience for creating this sort of site on a global scale. Nobody else does and even if they did I’m sure you could do it quicker. If a sport like Formula 1 can turn its resources to ventilators then this could be your contribution. I’m pretty sure that governments have already turned to you for help but local communities as need it.

What am I talking about?

It would become a dominant exchange at a micro-local level and would be complementary to your commercial offerings at it would be built to leverage the existing internet.

I wrote this idea as a project for my MBA and got a domain name ourjigsaw.com but could never work out how to launch the idea. Perhaps it’s an idea who’s time has come...

Glenn Robinson