BubblersApp Nesta Grant Application

A peer-based, personal contact management, exposure notification, and guideline dashboard app

Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

BubblersApp was inspired by an article written by Daniel Harris entitled Can we relax lockdown without Coronavirus proximity contact tracing? Then motivation to flesh out the idea came from the lure of a grant from Nesta. What follows is the raw text that we submitted, which is an ever so slightly prettier version of the document that we used to build the application, which is still open to comments and suggestions if you get the urge. But first here’s a quick plug…

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BubblersApp is brought to you by the ethical incubator, World Peace Now, and is being developed with technology from Kendraio supported by Imperial College London and the University of Reading.

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The BubblersApp proposal is not an alternative to the plethora of Bluetooth proximity-based contact tracing and exposure notification apps currently being rolled out rapidly in every country around the world. This peer-based app is a companion for and complementary to proximity-based apps. This peer-based, personal contact management, exposure notification, and guideline dashboard app does not require any central authority to work.

And now the application form…

Section 1: Contact details

1. Lead organisation name

• World Peace Now Foundation CIC

2. Lead organisation type

• CIC company limited by guarantee

3. Registered address of lead organisation

• 27 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AX, United Kingdom

4. Lead organisation contact person

• Daniel Harris

Section 2: Your proposal

6. Proposal name

• BubblersApp

7. Proposal summary (please provide a summary of your proposal, no longer than 150 words):

• BubblersApp is a peer-based, personal contact management, exposure notification, and guideline dashboard app.
• BubblersApp will enable people to manually track who they interact with and provide: a dashboard view of local, regional and national guidelines, highlighting recent changes; suggestions enabling informed, personal decisions about who and how they interact with; and the ability to notify members of their bubble of potential symptoms.
• We are applying for funds to run a feasibility study for BubblersApp. This will involve the development of a prototype; a prototype pilot with trial users; documentation of the process; and evaluation of the results of the study.
• The feasibility study will, among other things, investigate the following questions about usability and user experience: how do features, such as gamification and social sharing, enhance user experience and adoption; how does the app appeal to different user groups; and how does the peer-based (decentralised) aspect affect consumer attitudes.

8. Please explain what is the main question you are seeking to try to answer through your project? How does answering this question contribute to the NGI’s vision of building a more democratic, inclusive and resilient future internet? (max 200 words)

• Our main question is: how can a peer-based app empower individuals to keep themselves and their social and business contacts safe and informed in this time of COVID-19 and beyond?
• The app will tailor and filter guidelines based on specific personal metrics. We want to empower different individuals, like the immunocompromised, who need distancing, but also individuals with mental health diagnoses, who depend on social contacts, to assess their own risk, manage their own social contacts, and monitor their exposure in a way that takes their specific situation into account.
• This will lead to an open-source, decentralised exposure notification and risk management system that empowers people by enabling proactive instead of reactive behaviour. It will democratise the use of such technology in the current pandemic as well as future health and natural crises BubblersApp offers a more inclusive approach by not forcing one-size-fits-all solutions on marginalised groups and allowing them to make these essential decisions autonomously. This app is resilient because it will still function if centralised command centres are overwhelmed with disaster recovery procedures. Risks of system failure and mass privacy breaches are greatly reduced because centralised data storage is not necessary.

9. Please explain what about this idea is novel or innovative, or otherwise underexplored? (max 100 words)

• The aspects of this idea that are novel, innovative or underexplored: considering community resilience and the role of social contacts in national mass trauma recovery when developing crisis response solutions; driving adoption rates by using strong privacy models, which increases user trust; driving engagement by providing tailored/curated, and therefore more relevant, information to the user; providing people with the tools to take control and make informed decisions based on their own criteria.

10. Please outline how your project will help create actionable insights for policymakers, and could have a wider impact beyond the project? (max 250 words)

• In this Coronavirus crisis, the successful route to leave lockdown and fully return to ‘normality’ is unknown. There are many and varied actions which will assist in the process. Bluetooth-based contact tracing proximity-based exposure notification apps are being enthusiastically rolled out at a rapid pace. However, there are many reasons (both human and technological) why we should hedge our bets and experiment with complementary and companion approaches to managing who and how we interact with other people. All approaches need to be investigated, including bottom-up, because one size doesn’t fit all.
• Because contact tracing is such a contentious topic and elicits strong opinions from the public, we believe it’s important to see how our more bottom-up, manual approach is seen by users. Insights into how choice, control and certain features of such an app affect the users’ attitudes, adoption and usage rates, will assist in the design of future crisis management solutions, well beyond the Coronavirus pandemic.
• Our app will provide an excellent comparison between peer-based and proximity-based exposure notification systems. Our app will have the option for the general public, if they wish, to send anonymised or pseudonymised data to local or national government or health authorities, relating to their specific situation. This level of detail would not be possible with proximity-based exposure notification apps and manual contact tracers could never scale to get this many people. Nonetheless, policy-makers need this ‘on the ground’ information to be able to gauge the effectiveness of their policies.

11. How do you plan to carry out your project? What type of specific outputs will it generate? (max 200 words)

• We will build an open-source prototype of a peer-based personal contact management and exposure notification app. This will be developed on top of the open-source Kendraio App interoperability application framework. The prototype app will run on all platforms and devices, and not be dependent on the user having the latest operating system, hardware nor Bluetooth.
• A user will be able to build their ‘quaranteam’ from friend lists within their social networks. Messages will go via these social networks when a friend’s email address or mobile phone number are not known. This means that there is no need for all of the ‘quaranteam’ to use the app for it to be a useful tool — there is no critical mass needed for usefulness to occur.
• We will write a report detailing field testing, app documentation and evaluation. We will aim for a sample size of 50–100 users of all age groups and genders. We want to let participants test the prototype by themselves and with guidance, giving them a questionnaire (quantitative data about how likely they are to use the product and their experience overall) with short (virtual) interviews with participants (qualitative data on their feelings and experiences).

12. Please describe if the proposed work is part of a larger practical project or research programme? (max 150 words)

• The proposed project would leverage technical infrastructure (Kendraio App) developed in another research program (Bloomen EU H2020 funded).
• This project will leverage technical infrastructure (open-source Kendraio App interoperability application framework) developed within the Bloomen [1] research project, funded by the EU under the H2020 framework.
• It will also draw on relevant experience within the team e.g. as in “City Scripting a Smart City” (Carboni, Badii, et al 2013, EC-funded Smart Santander Project), psycho-cognitively based persona-context-aware personalisation and dynamic usability modelling (Badii 2008), context-aware privacy modelling (e.g. Badii 2012), MobiPETS-GRID (Badii 2006).
• We will use the team’s collective expertise in building and connecting to third-party APIs. This will enable us to plug the app into local, regional and national guideline announcement feeds for display in the BubblersApp dashboard view.
• [1] https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/762091 and https://bloomen.io

Section 3: Your Team

16. Please give details of any partner organisation involved in this proposal (if applicable)

• Name of organisation: Kendraio Foundation
• Type of organisation: NP LBG R&D
• Website: https://www.kendra.io
• Name of organisation: Imperial College London
• Type of organisation: University
• Website: https://wp.doc.ic.ac.uk/aese/people
• Name of organisation: Reading
• Type of organisation: University
• Website: https://www.reading.ac.uk/computer-science/

17. Please tell us briefly about your team and its experience relevant to your proposal (max 200 words)

• World Peace Now:
• Daniel Harris: leading Kendraio, an interoperability advocacy initiative, he founded in 1999, and World Peace Now, the “ethical incubator”. In 2018 Daniel helped launch, community-owned eosDAC (Decentralised Autonomous Community) on the EOS blockchain. In 1996, Daniel co-founded ISP, Cerbernet, which was acquired for over 4M GBP in 2000.
• Kendraio:
• Darren Mothersele: experienced developer with a background in computer science research and digital music. With a B.Sc. in Computer Science Darren completed four years post-graduate research in computer science, and a BRICS post-graduate course in Logical Methods.
• Lena Pagel: Creative Business (BA) student at Hogeschool Utrecht, an international study, emphasising cross-cultural awareness, ecosystem and critical thinking, and development of human-centred innovations.
• Imperial College London:
• Julie McCann’s work centres around architectures, algorithms, protocols and tools that allow computer systems to self-adapt to their environment and self-organise to improve their performance, quality or ability to scale and survive.
• Reading University:
• Atta Badii: Research Centre Director, Intelligent Systems Research Laboratory at the University of Reading. He has established a track record of key contributions to over 40 research projects funded by UK and EU agencies.
• Independent:
• Patricia Patterson-Vanegas: Wealden District Council Councillor for Forest Row.

Section 4: Budget & timelines

18. What is the total funding that you are requesting from the NGI Policy Experimentation fund? (the limit is €25,000, but you can ask for anything up to that amount)

• Max amount: €25K
• Max time: 6 months

19. Do you plan to seek any additional funding to run your project? Match funding is encouraged, but not mandatory.

• We will attempt to get additional funding but it is difficult in this current climate. It is also hard to get match funding generally. But with the kudos of winning a Nesta grant, we think getting additional funding will be easier. And we will look to do a crowdfunding campaign shortly after starting the project.

20. What is the envisioned start date and duration of your project? If your project needs to start before July 3 2020, please explain why.

• We are ready to start on September 1st 2020. This allows for the Universities to get back from holidays. We expect the total project to last 6 months from start to finish.