The data the world needed. Built by volunteers.

A world making decisions in the dark.

In the first months of the pandemic, the people making life-and-death decisions were working half blind. Case counts, hospital capacity, test results and policy changes were published by thousands of separate agencies, in different formats and languages, on web pages that changed without notice. No two countries, and often no two states, reported the same thing the same way.

At Google, a small team led by software engineer Oscar Wahltinez and technical program manager Aurora Cheung set out to fix that: one open repository, one consistent set of location keys, updated every day, free to anyone. The engineering could be automated. Finding, reading and verifying the sources could not. That needed people.

A five-year-old nonprofit says yes.

FinMango was a financial-health nonprofit, not a public-health institution. But it had what the project needed: a network of volunteers around the world willing to do careful, unglamorous work. In July 2020 the collaboration began.

Volunteers tracked down regional health-department feeds, read government bulletins, reconciled conflicting figures and hand-curated sources for places automated pipelines could not reach, from U.S. states to South Africa. They did it on top of school, jobs and family, through the worst months of the pandemic. Google's repository still credits FinMango for that manual curation, and for its research into how the pandemic was hitting local economies.

On August 27, 2020, Google.org told the world about the repository FinMango had helped build. That September, FinMango and Florida COVID Action compiled the most comprehensive dataset of COVID-19 in U.S. K-12 schools; an op-ed by Scott Glasgow and Oscar Wahltinez trended on U.S. News & World Report, and the work was picked up by The New York Times, CNN, Fortune, NBC and The Daily Beast.

From a thank-you letter to a permanent public record.

On March 15, 2021, Oscar and Aurora wrote to the volunteers on Google letterhead. By then the dataset was in use at the WHO and COVAX, the World Bank, the IMF, USAID, Harvard and Verily, and was feeding vaccine research, public policy and travel-safety decisions. That August, Google Health awarded FinMango a $50,000 grant for the collaboration.

In April 2022 the dataset was published in Nature Scientific Data as a global-scale, spatially granular meta-dataset. On September 15, 2022, with the emergency phase of the pandemic ending, real-time updates stopped and the repository became a permanent retrospective record, still open under a Creative Commons license. In 2023 the team published "The Mango Model" in the American Journal of Health Education, so the next crisis would have a blueprint. Oscar Wahltinez now serves on FinMango's Executive Board.

"This is a disease that infects people when they come together. Yet, coming together is also how we'll defeat this disease. That is exactly what FinMango has done."

Google, letter to FinMango volunteers, March 15, 2021