Blooming in the Time of Covid

There’s a scene in the movie The 5th Element where the villain, played by Gary Oldman, bloviates about how all the evil, destructive things he does are actually good, because they prompt the creation of industry and provide work for countless people. While we disagree strongly with the idea that the good that can come after evil things have happened somehow transmogrifies that evil into good, the fact remains that truly awful things—like a global pandemic, for example—can bring about some positive change. In the case of the team that oversees the Bloom software development, COVID-19 prompted a flurry of activity over the last twelve months, and the creation of materials and methods that will be useful long after the pandemic has ended.

The first project the team took on was to set up a page for Bloom Library that would act as a collection point for all of the COVID-19 books for each language. This currently has 261 books in 184 languages—books that can be adapted for other medical messaging purposes in the future, once this crisis has passed.

The second COVID-related project the Bloom team took on was in support of freelearning.io, a site set up by the government of Norway to make it easy for minority language students, their parents, and teachers to find online books across various websites. To do this, the Bloom team created an "API" cloud service that enabled that site to browse and search the collection of books on Bloom Library, and to access them. At its launch in beta, the freelearning.io platform included over eleven thousand resources in a hundred and fifty languages, with plans to increase that number a great deal.

Finally, the Bloom team partnered with Chetana Charitable Trust, an Indian charity that in more normal times provides physical books to children with various disabilities, including blind, deaf, and deaf-blind. When COVID-19 lockdowns meant they could no longer provide physical books, Chetana raced to create digital audio books that parents could use to continue helping their children during COVID lockdown. These books are tested by a group that includes library members, adults with disabilities, parents, and teachers as Chetana produces them, providing the Bloom team with crucial feedback from a mix of tech savvy and non-tech savvy adults and children, across a range of languages, experience, and economic backgrounds. In response, the Bloom team made various improvements to the Bloom ecosystem (editor, web site, phone/tablet apps). Chetana currently has thirty delightful Talking Books on Bloom Library, including a book with Indian Sign Language.

While we of course would have preferred that the pandemic had never happened, we are grateful to have been able to pivot in these ways, increasing the usability and effectiveness of Bloom as we move into a post-COVID future.