Social Movements are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breaking Point
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breaking Point:
For a brief period, panicking international students across the nation found hope in a Google Sheet.
When the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency announced on July 6 that international students who weren't enrolled in courses meeting in-person could face deportation in the fall, Sumana Kaluvai - the creator of H-4 Hope, a Facebook group that supports students of varying immigration backgrounds - built a system for connecting international students with peers who were willing to surrender their seats in courses that could grant their classmates the right to stay in the country. She used the closest tool in her reach, Google Sheets, to facilitate these class exchanges and began circulating the resource on social media.
Her spreadsheet quickly went viral, attracting levels of traffic that rendered it unresponsive. McClain Thiel, a data science student at the University of California, Berkeley, eventually reached out and offered to build a website to replace the Google Sheet, and on July 9, they launched Support Our International Students. Though ICE would rescind the policy days later, their new website managed to mitigate the problems the original Google Sheet encountered.
[...] When Stella Nguyen, a UCLA student from Vietnam, came across Kaluvai's spreadsheet, she "found it comforting that many students - international or not - were coming together." Google Docs has helped get us here, to an era where anyone who can create and edit a document can feel empowered to help others and foster hope and connection. Now, we just need tools that are as ambitious as we are.
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