COVID-19 contact tracing
Contact tracing and crisis communications built in weeks for governments under pressure, and what it taught me about technology made in moments of fear.
Tracing that couldn’t keep up
The concept came from wanting to do something useful in a crisis. Manual contact tracing was breaking down under the volume, and the bottleneck wasn’t only the virus. It was information flow and coordination.
Speed and care, with privacy at the centre
I could see a way to use digital check-ins and real-time data flows to map exposure faster, notify people sooner and take pressure off overwhelmed public health teams. The goal was never surveillance. It was the belief that thoughtful technology could protect public health without compromising civil liberties.
Minimal data
Collect only what tracing actually needs.
Limited storage
Keep it no longer than the public health purpose requires.
Transparency
Make it clear to people what happens with what they share.
From concept to adoption in weeks
In a matter of weeks I led the development of contact tracing forms, alongside a wider COVID-19 strategy of streamlined two-way communications and automated workflows. Within three months it had been adopted by 22 Australian government departments and agencies, and it was used by over a million people.
Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services started using it on 26 March 2020 to scale up contact tracing. Instead of phoning every close contact, the department could send automated check-ins to people in isolation, asking about their health, symptoms, testing and quarantine status each day, and see who needed follow-up. By May, police services in four jurisdictions, ambulance services in three, Queensland Corrective Services and Queensland’s Department of Transport and Main Roads were using it too.
Two-way, not broadcast
Daily health check-ins with people in isolation, updates for cases and close contacts, news from hospitals and testing sites, quarantine auditing, and alerts for people in an outbreak area. Every reply came back into the workflow, with a secure audit trail.
The channels people already used
SMS, email, WhatsApp and voice, so nobody needed to download anything, and agencies could set it up without waiting on their IT teams.
In the press: iTnews, Victoria ramps up COVID-19 contact tracing using Whispir (March 2020) · Whispir, platform used by government agencies for COVID-19 communications (May 2020)
Scale amplifies everything
When something moves from concept to adoption that fast, the intentions that shaped it get absorbed into systems with their own logic and incentives. Tracing systems designed for safety showed me how easily safety can slip into surveillance when urgency drowns out reflection. Technology isn’t neutral. It mirrors our values, our fears and our intent.
The systems we build in moments of fear shape the kind of world we live in long after the crisis has passed.
Empowerment instead of control
That project changed how I saw my work. When I co-founded SIX in 2023, I wanted to use the same tools, design, data and systems thinking, for empowerment instead of control. It’s also why so much of my work now asks what systems cost the people inside them.