Everyone is called on to provide ideas for anti-pandemic tools and solutions until (Fri) 2020-03-20 12:00 CET, and also everyone is called on to work in the 48 hours afterwards to make these ideas a reality. As usual, hackathons focus on IT software and hardware. And as usual in hackathons, I expect most ideas and products to get a good start there and gather a team but not be quite finished after the hackathon, so work will likely continue.
Also, all the results will be open source. Also they provide a list of resources that were developed during similar hackathons that happened in Estonia and Poland already.
The website is in German, but my guess is that you can safely ignore the language barrier because this is a crisis and the old rules and expectations went out the window. So, read the website in Google Translate and provide your ideas in English in case you can’t write in German.
A shame that the platform relies on various external (to the EU unsure, besides of slack) services, of which one is down.
I’d like to add a “Challenge” to the discussion over there, which is increased dependence on digital infrastructure in the hands of non-public institutions (yeah, my favorite topic, Open Source). I wish I could join the hackathon to throw some lights to exactly that problem. We shouldnt “attack” public problems (only) with business/investor mindsets. Solutions should be in the hands of the people (not meaning that skilled people shouldnt be also able to make a living out of providing, maintaining and applying them).
https://www.guaana.com/ (where one could contribute “Challenges”). The other platform used is typeform (which is actually within EU legislation). And because they had to be quick I assume that they kind of use every tool at hand (slack as well).
We are having that discussion in Edgeryders. A year ago, the decision for our specific set of needs (collaboration + permission management, we were so open that we had hundreds of people accessing our internal material every week) was: “Google Drive Enterprise for now, let’s keep an eye on OS solutions like CryptPad, OwnCloud etc.”.
Now would be a good time to stop paying Google and give the money to a European SME relying on OSS. But it is also a bad time to break our processes
@matthias and @felix.wolfsteller, did you participate? How was your experience of the hackathon? My brother participated and said he had quite a few problems with access and connection.
I participated and yes, there were initially some issues with connectivity. It became much better after the initial surge of activity. We learn from this that Slack will make your computer run hot when used by 27,000 simultaneous users in your workspace
I was watching a webinar with Naomi Klein who reminded about the importance of redundancies and non-corporate communication infrastructure in place if we are to rethink what (climate) activism will look like in the near-term future.
