covid-19 project initiative

[Maziar Siami <ma...@yahoo.com.INVALID>]

Hi All,
I am not sure if this email list is the relevant one. But hope it is close enough.
I believe Apache foundation could launch projects to leverage volunteers and technology in addressing  covid-19 outbreak.There can be different innovative ideas,  e.g., A mobile apps to help with tracking the places a covid-19 positive patient visited, to warn others if they were in the vicinity. Etc.
Regards,
Maziar

Re: covid-19 project initiative

[Sriram Narayanan <sr...@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 23 Mar 2020 at 3:24 AM, Maziar Siami <ma...@yahoo.com.invalid>
wrote:

> Hi All,
> I am not sure if this email list is the relevant one. But hope it is close
> enough.
> I believe Apache foundation could launch projects to leverage volunteers
> and technology in addressing  covid-19 outbreak.There can be different
> innovative ideas,  e.g., A mobile apps to help with tracking the places a
> covid-19 positive patient visited, to warn others if they were in the
> vicinity. Etc.


I’m part of various open source and tech groups and I see related
discussions. The General consensus is that if there are ongoing
initiatives, one could start supporting those ( context: tech folk getting
frustrated that the particular organisation they are part of is “doing
nothing” whereas those org members are actually helping at other places.)

See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22650725




> Regards,
> Maziar
>

Re: covid-19 project initiative

[Shane Curcuru <as...@shanecurcuru.org>]

Maziar Siami wrote on 2020-3-22 3:03PM EDT:
> Hi All,
> I am not sure if this email list is the relevant one. But hope it is close enough.
> I believe Apache foundation could launch projects to leverage volunteers and technology in addressing  covid-19 outbreak.There can be different innovative ideas,  e.g., A mobile apps to help with tracking the places a covid-19 positive patient visited, to warn others if they were in the vicinity. Etc.

The ASF is about supporting our project communities.  So it's up to
projects or individual committers to start doing the work.

One note: as geeks, we often want to build a new tool to do X.  Running
a local mutual aid site in my hometown, I did just that to coordinate
different volunteer groups.  The technology isn't the hard problem - the
hard problem is (always) people.

Getting volunteers to do the organizing, leafleting, actually checking
on neighbors or actually sewing hospital-accepted masks is hard.  So
anytime you see a group of organized volunteers, what they need is help,
not some new tool.  The hardest thing is figuring out how to help
improve their *existing* tools and processes.

For example, I cringe every time I see a new mutual aid group spring up
based on a set of complex Google Docs, because the URLs are impossible
to remember (for trading with neighbors), and Google Docs performance
has nosedived for me lately.  But that's not important: what's important
is the core volunteers actually doing the local work are comfortable
with Google Docs.

If you do have specific ideas, please do bring them up, to see if you
can get some more folks interested!

-- 

- Shane
  Committer - The Apache Software Foundation
  Organizer - https://mutualaidarlington.org/tech?asf

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