How to use open source for public welfare?

2020/04/08 21:00
Reading number 253




|Author: Brother Xue

|Reprinted from: Innovation Research

|Editor: Wang Haoyue

|Designer: Liu Yingjie



Introduction of Kaiyuan News Agency


Wuhan2020 Open Source Community and Open Source Society jointly develop "Open Source for Good" - that is, develop open source infrastructure to support global public welfare undertakings, and coordinate global public welfare activities to promote sustainable development of the community.

What we are carrying is not only the rampant virus fight, but also an open source social experiment. We will build a digital ecosystem of "open source for good" by gathering global collaborators, always centering on the theme of public welfare and open source, continue to play the role and influence of their communities, organically connect public welfare volunteers and technology developers in depth, and then achieve the goal of solving public welfare problems by technical means.

Write in front


One year for business school and one week for open source community. From Day 1 to participate in the rapid development of the Wuhan2020 open source community, I had the opportunity to practice and reflect on what I learned at Stanford Business School. It is hereby written and shared with friends.

This is the first article in the Wuhan 2020 series, How to Use Open Source for Public Welfare.

In the near future, Wuhan 2020 will be viewed from entrepreneurship and innovation, product design, leadership, technology driven public welfare innovation and other aspects.

01

What does Wuhan 2020 do?


Wuhan 2020: 6300+star GitHub project, 3000+open source community of developers and volunteers.


Many people may not know what GitHub is. They may have heard that "open source" is a kind of software, and may have the impression that "developers" are programmers - but what does this have to do with public welfare?


Wuhan2020 Open Source Community It is a public welfare open source organization born from the global epidemic of COVID-19 Volunteer and Technology Developer The formed community aims to solve the urgent problems exposed in the epidemic with open source collaboration and digital technology.


02

What are the urgent problems?



On January 22, 2020, Wuhan, Red Cross Hospital

(Picture source: Caixin)


It's not urgent It's gone


At the initial stage of COVID-19 outbreak, there were a large number of patients in Wuhan, and there was actually a "medical run"; The high incidence of critical illness and the long average hospital stay of patients further occupy medical resources, increase the risk of death and form a vicious circle.

As a result of the "medical run", the incidence of critical illness in Wuhan reached 18%, 1.8 times that of the whole country outside Hubei Province.
Public account: Tuanjie Daily How to reduce the mortality of COVID-19? Mao Zongfu, a member of the National Revolutionary Movement, paid attention to six suggestions

Public medical resources are unable to face the surge of patients. Hospitals in Wuhan and surrounding cities and counties are in urgent need of medical supplies such as masks, which seriously threaten the life safety of medical staff.

"Ask for help. The Western Hospital of Peking Union Medical College Hospital is designated for treatment. The medical supplies at the front line are either in urgent need or gone!"

"All the wards are full, but the patients don't have any wards. The doctors are short of supplies, so they are fighting with viruses in hand to hand combat."

https://www.infzm.com/contents/175688


Wuhan citizens are also discriminated against, and their accommodation is blocked everywhere.


"As long as they are from Hubei, they will not be allowed to live."

"I was kicked out by another hotel today."


Major public health events belong to more complex types in public social events, which are difficult to arrange as a whole and have a long cycle. The rapid development of COVID-19 epidemic and the inability of existing mechanisms to respond flexibly in real time form a major contradiction


Volunteers tired into dogs


A large number of public welfare people and volunteers quickly and spontaneously carry out rescue operations on the Internet to help hospitals and doctors release and transmit needs, and help find medical assistance and emergency supplies.

However, it is difficult to communicate effectively because of the scattered platforms for private information collection and publication, the disordered data format and information, and a large amount of picture information is not conducive to real-time communication.

While information is flying all over the world, a large number of distorted and false information spreads rapidly, which seriously affects the efficiency and effect of non-governmental self-organized rescue work.

Some volunteers even said that they spent 80% of their time fighting against false information. Volunteers responded to a large number of questions.

  • "The workload is heavy, and you are tired. A lot of information needs to be confirmed by calling one by one."


  • "Some information circulated on the Internet has been tampered with. I wonder if the data in the WeChat group itself has also been tampered with."


  • "The information I have verified is also being verified by other teams and organizations, and repeated efforts are being made."


  • "In the hospital, the demand data of the doctors in the department may not be synchronized with the data uniformly released by the hospital."


  • "The demand data was released in the morning and changed in the afternoon. How to ensure timeliness?"


  • "The information collection channels are inconsistent and duplicate, and the same message is published on N platforms."


  • ......


03

How can we solve it?


How to let the general public, grassroots volunteers and professional rescue groups play a role in the highly decentralized and rapidly changing rescue work?

Open source collaboration


In this context, a group of developers who love the open source culture set up the Wuhan2020 project website on GitHub, the world's largest software development cooperation platform, providing a self-organizing cooperation platform for developers and volunteers to help Wuhan folk rescue work more effectively.

The open source software movement is a cultural phenomenon in the field of computer science, which originates from hackers' pursuit of intellectual achievement sharing and freedom.

With the development of the open source movement, the culture that can actively promote the development of human civilization has penetrated into the fields of information, education, health and other fields, and has been integrated into the philosophy category.

https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%BC%80%E6%BA%90%E6%96%87%E5%8C%96



Wuhan 2020 initially developed an information platform to connect the supply and demand of emergency medical supplies in Wuhan. Through online cooperation with hundreds of volunteers, software developers gathered the first-line rescue experience of a large number of volunteers and established a standard process for information collection, verification, entry and release.

Focus: valuable early experience, continuous learning and iteration


At the beginning of the epidemic, the social system failed, people's anxiety, helplessness and despair spread, and voluntary action ran against time. The experience that quickly passes the practical test is the gold mine, which must be combed, summarized, precipitated and promoted.

Taking information verification as an example, volunteers summarized a series of key experiences, including:

  • Process, process, process : The process standardizes everyone's behavior to ensure everyone's actions are consistent and the deviation of results is small;


  • Data input and verification funnel: collection - verification - entry - release;


  • Cross validation with public information;


  • It supports direct entry by hospital summary personnel, with the highest degree of credibility and the information of entry personnel.


remind : Experience will iterate with the rapid development of things, so volunteer organizations need to have an open mind and fast learning ability to constantly accumulate and translate experience into practical action.


What can developers and volunteers do together?


  1. Document precipitation: based on the summarized experience, the community has developed a set of standard operating procedures (SOP, Standard Operating Procedure ), Formed Information Collaboration Process Specification Information Collection and Input Process Specification , and Information Review Process Specification Complete specification system;


  2. Top level design: developers design and develop an information platform, and focus their top level design on standard collaboration processes and standard input specifications;


  3. Tool selection: avoid information fragmentation, and use the graphite document tool based on cloud collaboration for unified information collection;


  4. Cooperation mechanism: the volunteers adopt the grouping system and streamline operation The above specification system Carry out distributed cooperation to ensure effective, accurate, timely and efficient allocation of social resources.


Special


  1. The whole process, except for data review, has all the data automation No manual intervention is required to ensure the large-scale horizontal expansion capability in the later stage;


  2. All data must After real name auditor to examine , ensuring the accuracy and effectiveness of data entry;


  3. Record all Historical changes To facilitate data analysis.


04

Promotion and application


In just a few weeks, the Wuhan2020 information platform covers the hospital demand table and donation table; Provide free hotel data for medical staff in Hubei Province; Help provide free clinic forms; Make Wuhan tourists travel in appearance and so on.

Wuhan 2020 has attracted more than 3000 volunteers from different countries through voluntary public welfare activities, and has gradually developed into an efficient and orderly community. It has made contributions to the fight against the new coronavirus through the establishment of information systems, data analysis and prediction, and has maximized the value of technological anti epidemic.

The community not only open source software and data, but also actively help other volunteer organizations to improve work efficiency and implement collaboration, forming an important node of decentralized volunteer network.

  • For example, we connected the data provided by Oxbridge Alumni Assistance Association on Wuhan communities and hospitals and communities in surrounding cities, and helped them implement standard workflow;


  • We helped the Gliding Eagle team in Silicon Valley connect with four hospitals and a community in Wuhan and its surrounding areas, and donated 1411 N95 masks to them;


  • A global medical information service platform in the United States learned about the needs of the epidemic area and provided medical material assistance worth about 1 million yuan for China through the access to the Wuhan 2020 information platform.



Image source: https://medium.com/non-disclosure/hacking-for-wuhan-and-others-bc2d1f7d7feb

At present, the community has successfully incubated more than 10 open source projects, including "New Coronavirus Epidemic Prevention Information Collection Platform", "2020 Assistance to Wuhan", "Wuhan 2020 Open Source Community Official Website", and "COVID-19-Nav Epidemic Information Navigation".

05

Special gains



In the early stage of project and community development, Wuhan 2020 has experienced major iterations.

In this battle against the epidemic, there is a special kind of "man in the middle" software that has played a huge role, that is, digital cooperative robots. The code collaboration between developers on the GitHub platform, the automatic synchronization of information between GitHub and Slack platforms, and the automatic statistics of developers' weekly contributions are all behind the silent support of collaboration process robots, which can be called the digital collaboration heroes behind this epidemic.

The cooperative robot of Wuhan2020 will continue to standardize, transparent and intelligent the process of large-scale distributed cooperation, improve cooperation efficiency and promote more innovation.

06

Thinking: a decentralized open source public welfare practice


"Under the disaster, a transparent and credible information platform can help decentralized, bottom-up volunteer network, and rapidly scale collaborative behavior." Ms. Wu Ying, the Chinese project leader of Stanford Charity and Social Innovation Center, commented on Wuhan 2020.


Open source creates value


Less than three months after its birth, Wuhan 2020 has experienced a rapid development process from project to community, from community to decentralized global network collaboration. The preliminary work and development process of Wuhan 2020 reveal the special meaning of open source to public welfare.


  • Open source data

    An information platform without data is like a skillful woman making bricks without straw. In a disaster scenario, only by getting through the isolated island of data and allowing information to flow quickly can all rescue parties work together to produce maximum efficiency. Therefore, the necessity of open source of public data is self-evident.


  • Open source software

    Data acquisition, transmission, use and value-added are inseparable from software. Open source software can accelerate the sharing of knowledge and experience and promote innovation. Under the common goal of dealing with social crisis, software open source can enable more people to participate in it, form a consensus, pool their wisdom, and overcome suffering.


  • Collaborative open source

    It can be seen from the problems encountered by volunteer rescue that collaboration - especially cross crowd, cross organization and cross platform collaboration - is a common challenge facing public welfare organizations today, which directly affects human behavior and even human development.


    In the context of epidemic prevention, the collaborative process of demand collection and software construction, as well as the specific application methods and successful experience of software for disaster relief are open and shared. It is collaborative and open source. For example, Wuhan 2020 will open and promote the standard process of data acquisition, validation, entry and release.


  • Digitizing tools

    Since the birth of Wuhan2020, the efficiency of global network collaboration inside and outside the community is obvious to all, which also constitutes a basic organizational form of Wuhan2020 community. The use of digital tools such as graphite, GitHub, Slack, WeChat and so on has dramatically enlarged the scale and effect of collaboration.


Community development direction


Ms. Connie Chan, a partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a top venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, delivered a speech on "Building Products with Sustained Influence" at the Hack for Wuhan finals held in the community, encouraging more innovation combining technology and public welfare.


The development direction of Wuhan2020 community can be summarized as "Open source for good" ——That is, develop open source infrastructure to support global public welfare undertakings and coordinate global public welfare activities to promote sustainable community development.


  • The Wuhan2020 open source community is not only carrying the fight against the rampant virus, but also an open source social experiment: gathering global collaborators to create a digital ecology of "open source for good".


  • The community will always focus on the theme of public welfare and open source, continue to play the role and influence of Wuhan 2020, and connect public welfare volunteers and technology developers in depth, so as to achieve the goal of solving public welfare problems by technical means.


Next Stage Objectives


Wuhan2020 community has reached a basic consensus that the next stage will focus on the theme of "open source infrastructure construction for public welfare scenarios". Where, based on Standardization and automation of collaborative processes for collaborative robots , which is not only a core theme and difficulty of the current public welfare infrastructure construction, but also a valuable experience Wuhan 2020 has gained from the preliminary work.


Wuhan 2020 will deeply explore the collaboration needs of the public welfare community and the open source community, formulate the core functions of the project and develop iterations; While Wuhan2020 community carries out self service, it will find potential public welfare organizations or open source communities for promotion and use.


At present, the community has cooperated with Ginkgo Foundation, Zhuoming Disaster Information Service Center and other public welfare organizations.


Open source changes collaboration, processes drive innovation, and jointly create the future of public welfare technology.






Introduction to Kaiyuan News Agency



The Open Source Society is a manufacturer neutral, volunteer and non-profit open source alliance organized by enterprises, communities and individuals at home and abroad who support open source in accordance with the principle of "contribution, consensus and co governance", aiming to jointly create a healthy and sustainable open source ecosystem and promote the Chinese open source community to become an active participant and contributor of global open source software. We focus on open source governance, international integration, community development and open source projects.


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