Online self-help tools flourish as residents in city tackle lockdown

When Shanghai resident Stanley Liu, who runs a small film production studio, learned in April that areas in the city east of the Huangpu River would not be emerging from lockdown as per the original plan, the first person he thought of was an elderly neighbour who earns a living by recycling rags.

He joined the local Residents Committee in Xuhui District, with the aim of helping the elderly in his compound. He then had a bigger idea to see if various self-help documents appearing on social media for those living under lockdown could be pooled into one manual. So he called a friend who is a software engineer.

“When it comes to communications, everyone trusts mainstream tools like Tencent Docs and WeChat Official Accounts,” said 37-year-old Liu. “But when the traffic becomes too heavy to handle, you may not be able to open what you’re looking for and there can be information delays.”

That is how he and software engineer Paul Qi had the idea of creating easy-to-use features for a website registered under Liu’s company to connect those desperate for food as well as physical and mental health support during lockdown to potential solutions.

Inspired by the spirit of a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), which is collectively owned by members with an equal say, as well as his carrot-heavy diet during lockdown, the website name daohouer.com combines DAO and “hou”, which translates into English as ‘monkeys’.

Since the site was launched on April 6, there were around 6,500 enquiries from Shanghai residents as of last week. Of these, 56 per cent had been resolved and marked with a green tick, including one plea for help which read “I’m in a group rental with no cooking area. I’m surviving on hardtack biscuits and my company has died”, from a user in Pudong New Area.

A wave of online questionnaires, mini-programmes and shared documents emerged in the initial days of Shanghai’s Covid-19 flare-up in early March, with the goal of connecting people in need with food and medical supplies. However, the widely-used spreadsheet feature of Tencent Docs typically allows only 200 users to edit a document at any given time. This number has doubled in special emergencies, such as last year’s floods in central Henan province, according to various media reports.

With the strict lockdown in Shanghai, several self-help digital websites and tools have surfaced to handle a bigger volume of requests or to suit special purposes, such as boosting group-buying productivity or checking one’s lockdown status.

Liu’s website has a basic interface, and he said he had the elderly in mind when designing it, as they may not be as adept as youngsters when navigating novel tech features. A 2020 government report noted that there are 5.33 million elderly residents in Shanghai, defined as those above 60.

“The simple design of these digital products [reflects] this public emergency, as well as the huge demand that has occurred in a short period of time,” said Vicky Li, managing director of the China office of Digital Retex, a marketing agency specialising in Chinese social media. “User interface is less of a concern but basic functions need to be met.”

Shanghai resident Li has used many tools herself, including one called “dream city profile picture builder”, which generates social media profile pictures for users to show the flat number of their homes, or their role in a group-buying chat group. “It is … based on a small insight that groupbuying deals need to frequently check household information … it has been widely shared and recommended.”

Wenny Chen, a Jingan District resident in Puxi, is “Team Leader of the Vegetable Group” in her community WeChat group, identified as such by her profile picture. Local media reports have described volunteer leaders like Chen as “superheroes”.

Under Shanghai’s lockdown, the authorities have restricted mobility by designating different districts as “lockdown zones”, “control areas” and “low-risk areas”, ranging from high to low risk based on the number of positive cases. As such, people have been eager to find out their own status.

Official information has been scattered across various websites and social media accounts, making it difficult for residents to track their status, according to Chloe Kou, who lives in Puxi, in the centre of Shanghai.

“When the self-help action of residents is combined with the internet’s open and shared nature, it carries potential organisational power,” said Kou, who has been using a mobile site called “Micro Delivery” to check her compound’s status.

Similar sites, including Shanghai Covid Outbreak Calculator and chenfan.info, indicate the estimated time for compounds to be freed from lockdown based on Shanghai Municipal Health Commission data.

Giuseppe Imbrenda, an Italian who lives in Changning District who uses the calculator to check his compound’s status, said that unofficial tools like these answer the most pressing question in a time of uncertainty: “When will I be free to go out?”

Imbrenda’s experience may only be representative of expats who understand Chinese though. “Even though artificial intelligence has done wonders, most [expats] need to resort to second-hand, filtered-by-translation information,” said Imbrenda, adding that English language news may lag behind Chinese news by a day or two.

Independent projects aimed at helping people during lockdowns have faced their own challenges. Amid an avalanche of enquiries, Liu and his team of volunteers have had to watch out for medicine salespeople who may be looking to profit from those in desperate need, he said.

Big Tech still has a vital role to play. For example, Daohouer’s volunteers rely on WeChat groups to manage the process and workflow of each inquiry.

A medical inquiry submitted to the website using a questionnaire form is forwarded to the medical expert chat group, which acts like a hospital triage.

Volunteers in the coordination group then take the opinion of the medical experts on the case to the online platforms of real hospitals for prescriptions and medicine pickup locations. The rest is done by delivery people in another WeChat group.

Jingan resident Chen said she also used Tencent Docs to manage enquiries for group buying and to help the elderly in her building, as the Residents Committee had been decimated by positive Covid-19 cases.

“Hi-tech tools have their merits, but in many situations, you need both communication and tech tools to make it work,” Chen said.