The Decentralized Generation of Public Knowledge during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Examples from Australia

Abstract

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2022, public uncertainty about the nature of the virus, and in particular its symptoms and mode of transmission, was met by the daily briefings issued by public health departments and political leaders. They were ill-equipped to respond to emerging knowledge management demands in an agile fashion. As this paper will show, this gap was filled on a volunteer basis by personal initiative. Examples for this are contact tracing register applications, an archive of daily COVID-19 incidence numbers at local government levels and a crowdsourced site that allowed the public find rapid antigen test kits during a time of extreme shortages. Once government and professional bodies eventually caught up and supplanted these volunteer endeavours, they become obsolete and by and large forgotten. Yet it can be posited that societal angst would have been much greater without them.