Hacking for Wuhan — and Others
Updated on 4/05/2020. Countries make hard decisions between economic damage, reduction in personal freedoms, and public health. What can we learn from China? An article about Chinese response to the COVID-19 is published on Think Global Health. Thanks Christopher Thomas for leading this.
I was born in Wuhan, and wanted to help those early victims of coronavirus. I heard that hospitals lacked masks and other supplies. So, online, from the Bay Area, I collected data on shortages and connected the Wuhan hospitals with suppliers on a healthcare platform in the U.S. The platform, Global Anti-2019-nCoV Consortium, found respirators, gloves, coveralls, and other supplies in Sweden. Within two weeks in February, they were shipped to China.
I wanted to help more. I joined Wuhan2020, an open source community building software that consolidates demand-supply information for medical equipment for the fight against coronavirus. I built partnerships with other groups by sharing Wuhan2020’s data and software for free.
The Wuhan2020 community grew to more than 3,000 developers and volunteers in less than a month. Now we want to find new missions as the pandemic spreads.
In early March, I created a “Hack for Wuhan” hackathon to unite developers and volunteers to solve many unmet needs, such as mental health support and social distancing, through digital technologies. GSB staff, students, and alumni supported me. Bernadette Clavier, Executive Director of the Center for Social Innovation at GSB, shared with me her insight on adopting Design Thinking process to solve social challenges, as many people coded without empathizing with the users that had the problems.
Xiaoyin Qu (’20) helped me with an event-hosting platform that her company Run The World was building. GSB alumna Anna Fang, Stanford alumnus Xuwen Cao, Eva Woo from the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, Rick Zhuang (MSx ’20), Chen (Jaggie) Zhu (MSx ’19), Huimin Lu (MSx ’19), and Qi Lu (MSx ’19) joined as judges and mentors.
All told, 902 people from 33 countries registered and 58 projects/teams participated in the competition. Winning projects include solutions for disaster relief, psychological aid, and donation management. Connie Chan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recognized this event as “the biggest hackathon for developers around the world to come to the aid of Wuhan.”
The winner of first prize was a crowdsourced labelling system for epidemic data. People can add more meaningful tags to the data and make it more informative.
City Hero, a role-playing game, brought players back to the moment of adversity when people feared, hesitated and struggled. Players can observe, think, then help their city return to normal.
Wuhan2020 also led to robotic software that helps developers automate the collaboration process among platforms such as GitHub and Slack. Developers will now be more productive to innovate.
Learnings from Hack for Wuhan and its participants shed light on how volunteering can help the fight against coronavirus. Now I am working with Anna Fang, Huimin Lu, Jaggie Zhu and a group of GSBers on an article that summarizes the core of the Chinese response to the virus. No matter your political affiliation or view on the origins of the pandemic, this dramatic reduction in new cases merits study — and can provide ideas for other governments and organizations.
