Call for volunteers: Techies against COVID-19
Hi tilders. I'll keep it brief: I'm looking for people of various technical skills (devs, sysadmins, etc) willing to volunteer their skills at labs, hospitals and other establishments in the fight against COVID-19.
A lot of us are lucky to be some of the least-affected by the virus. Not only is the technical field generally young and low-risk, but it's one of the most compatible with work-from-home professions.
So I'm trying to use some of the free time during this lockdown to set up a volunteer network, focused on tech.
I'm looking for two types of people specifically:
- Anyone with tech experience: programmers, web devs, devops/sysadmins, etc; who has time they want to spend on this.
- Anyone who works in or adjacent-to the medical field, who can help with identifying high-priority and impactful needs (who needs help the most, and how to reach them most efficiently)
Note: The immediate goal is to build up a network of potential volunteers. I've been doing this on my own for a bit and there's clearly lots of needs, but it's hard to convince labs and hospitals to onboard a single person, so I'm hoping to get more people on board before continuing the search.
Stay safe.
What skills? What are you trying to provide?
Honestly, the most direct, immediate, high-impact thing most of us can do is go donate blood.
That little PSA out of the way, I'm not much of a developer, but I've got experience managing telehealth and other healthcare IT projects, as well as support and server/network tasks. I'll volunteer as a beta-tester, if nothing else.
What exactly is your end goal?
See edit. cc @gaywallet
Still entirely uncertain what your goal is or what you are asking for, but as someone who works in health IT feel free to add me to the list.
I've joined up with the Help with COVID Discord. See the #TAC19 group in there. It's a better place to organize all this.
I know the vagueness doesn't help but the difficulty is in finding projects that people can help with, without interfering with regular work / asking overworked staff to spend a bunch of time onboarding volunteers.
@patience_limited I especially need people connected to the healthcare industry who would know either where the most impactful / critical needs are, or who would be a good point of contact for specific establishments.
cc @3d12 @just_a_salmon @The-Toon @Gaywallet
I'm knee deep in requests for this on the patient care side of data (been working since this weekend), I don't really have time for thought experiments, but happy to be a point of contact for questions.
Can you elaborate?
I want to avoid thought experiments as well. Plenty of projects are doing that. My goal is to help alleviate the load on hospitals and labs using tech. If more people join, it becomes a broader goal of connecting volunteer technical talent to immediate problems those establishments are facing.
I'm busy scrambling to create reports so we have a better idea of the impact and how to prepare for the expected impact.
How? You've been extremely vague
Case by case. For example one local hospital group here in Belgium needed some fixes to an intranet tool that was too slow which caused issues. My hope obviously is to build/do things that can be reused by other establishments but at this point, who the fuck knows, too many unknowns. But there is a clear need for skilled technical labor in certain places, and if there is a need where you work, you'll know that better than me.
My connections are a bit out of date, but I'll provide whatever assistance I can.
I guess I’ll put my name in. I’m a software engineer, roughly five years experience. My experience is mostly writing distributed stuff for ad-hoc networks, relational databases (MySQL and SQLite), Linux system administration, and general scripting. I’ve done a little bit of REST API work as well.
I definitely want more concrete goals though; the vagueness is off-putting.
I'm decent with full-stack webdev, and could be willing to help out. If you identify a need where those skills would be helpful, feel free to let me know.
Yes definitely. And I could use the help setting up a simple static site for this group, as a most immediate need.
I'm still a student, but I have a reasonable amount of programming experience so if this gets going I would be happy to help.
I've been trying to get another of my projects off the ground in the free time I've found myself with, but I think I'd be OK with spending some of it doing generally more helpful (read: less selfish) things.
My expertise is geared more towards linux sysadmin and scripting than full-stack anything, but I'm also an analyst professionally so I "speak SQL fluently," as it were. If you need any spreadsheets or PivotTables/Charts too, let me know.
Senior java web dev here ("full stack" as the kids call it now). I'm in if you can convince me the project is tenable.