How to Join Wuhan2020 Open Source Project, and Help Wuhan Survive the Coronavirus Crisis

Bill Gates’ TED speech after Ebola’s outbreak in 2015

Foreword

This is the TED speech made by Bill Gates after Ebola’s outbreak in 2015. He believes that in the next few decades, if there is anything can kill millions of people, it should be microbes such as highly contagious virus instead of wars or missiles. Globally we lack investment and research on this subject, and our preparation for infectious disease outbreak is even more insufficient.

Nowadays, we review this speech once again in the middle of the Coronavirus crisis, and find Bill’s insights that still apply. Our wuhan2020 open source project is also inspired by his speech, and we hope the humanity can start from this point, take actions, respect nature and life and save our future.

Wuhan2020 Volunteer Group and Collaboration

The power of open source is overwhelming. After only 6 days, we are already forming an enormous volunteer group:

Groups:

Oversight Group: Running day-to-day work of wuhan2020 society
Technology Group: Engineers and technology experts for the project
Information Group: Currently responsible for information fetching, input and reviewing
Coordination Group: Coordinating collaboration and human resources among groups, and developing process standards
Publicity Group: In charge of publication of the project, as well as brand building, designing, copywriting and developing market channels
Risk and legal Group: Controlling the overall risk of the project, developing protocols and standards for data security and compliance

Collaboration Media:

Oversight Group: WeChat groups + Shimo Documents
Information Group: WeChat groups + Shimo Documents
Technology Group: Slack + Github + WeChat groups + Shimo Documents
Coordination Group: WeChat groups + Shimo Documents
Publicity Group: WeChat groups + Shimo Documents
Risk and legal Group: WeChat groups + Shimo Documents

WUHAN2020 LOGO

Thanks to our collaborative work, everything is moving forward smoothly. At the same time, the messiness of the open source bazaar is constantly inspiring innovations. For example, society’s logo and visual properties are invented under such environment.

Our final decision is to choose the idea with the highest number of votes:

Design concept:

We are together with Wuhan Both ‘Wuhan’ and ‘We’ starts with ‘W’, so we chose the logo ‘W’ as the base of our design, implying we stay with Wuhan forever.
Heart links heart, love passes love The logo links two heart together into a W, and formed a bigger heart, expressing our heart and love links with Wuhan, and we shall survive this crisis together.
More hands produce a stronger flame The logo contains the maths symbol for infinity, implying that even individually we are powerless, we can generate infinite power in every dimension when we put our head and love together.

The designers are still revising the logo with more possible combination with words.

We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere appreciation for our fellows!

WUHAN2020 Translation Team

Our translation team has finished the English version and is continuously improving the work, in order to provide convenient environment for global colleagues to collaborate with us.

WUHAN2020 Development Team

Not to mention that our development team is making our slack channel a 24-7 nonstop battlefield. Of course, chaos is expected (while we are finding consensus among all the chaos we are experiencing). If you wish to learn about all the anecdotes (‘fights’ and ‘brawls’), please stick with us and we shall provide you all the latest reports about the ‘accidents’.

Oversea legions are flowing in. The number of channels is constantly increasing

WUHAN2020 Thoughts and Ideas

After all the conflicts and innovations we had in the past, we starts to come up with some thoughts and ideas (we welcome further discussions on those subjects):

1. Wuhan2020 is an open source project, and is aiming at solving real-life issues

The project wuhan2020 is focusing on developing the data platform, which is the major objective of our society. We are dealing with data distribution and publication with accuracy for massive information of different types under extreme conditions. This solution is a combination of a lot of procedures, including data fetching protocols, data exchange procedures, audit regulations, fundamental constructions and tools, and so on, mainly applied in the new Coronavirus crisis in Wuhan and its neighbours.

At the same time, we are encouraging all the volunteers to build up our data platform even further, including all the front-end applications, mini programs, data conversion tools.

We are aiming at developing a fully functional solution and infrastructure to fight the new Coronavirus. Meanwhile, we are also hoping to summarize existing knowledge and experience through our first-hand practice, so that human beings can find reference for similar events in the future. Just like what we heard from Bill Gates, every region, as well as every group of people should form a reactive information system to deal with crisis under extreme circumstances, so that they can provide assistance for other non-profit organizations, institutions and governments.

2. Wuhan2020 is a still group of people, but is transforming into a community

After a few days of evolution, wuhan2020 has started to formulate a combination of charity society and open source community. Non-technology volunteers are collaborating through Wechat and Shimo, while programmers and developers are working together using standard GitHub and Slack. Everyone are communicating, discussing, and even arguing about the latest crisis, and there are disagreements between products and developers, gaps between publicity and technology, even division within the developers about technology stacks. However, we believe this is natural for a big bazaar, and all those experts and leaders require actual contribution to establish their status. Hence agreements and regulations are coming up in small scales, and we are seeing more and more results.。

Open source community has started to formulate a few common grounds
(English version is provided on the website)

3. Wuhan2020 is also a test field for open source governance

X-lab, the founder of this project, itself is a team of open source enthusiasts and practitioners, and this crisis is a brilliant opportunity for us to practice open source governance on a large scale. As a developer group, we are especially interested in infrastructure on open source governance, and we believe, as a Bazaar, we also need our equipment. Nowadays the world is different, where the environment for development is better than ever, allowing individual developer to have more capability. That is why all those online collaborative tool and SaaS service is so popular.

Classic dialog between The Cathedral (left hand side, leading by the government) and The Bazaar (open source collaboration)

We would like to take this opportunity to ask for a favour. Due to the large number of developers and the overwhelming amount of information, the share from free Slack version is consumed in only 4 days. If anyone knows people from Slack, please ask if Slack can upgrade for non-profit project like us? (Slack is really expensive), otherwise we shall consider moving to another platform. This is actually a perfect opportunity for Slack to promote itself in China, and we are looking for a win-win situation.

4. Wuhan2020 can also be a social experiment

We are in a highly globalized world, and the internet is bringing everyone in this digitalized world closer than ever. When humanity is facing crisis like the new Coronavirus, how should we cooperate? The internet is making social collaboration in large scale (even a humongous scale) possible. But how should we design data procedure in big scale collaborations? What is the behaviour of developers in this situation? How to guide others to organize by themselves? How to co-evolve? What kind of collaboration tools is more popular among developers? How shall the promising blockchain be applied in solving issues? What kind of inspiring techniques and operating modes shall charity organizations and open source projects take? These are all questions that need an answer. In fact, we come to realize that when we start to deal with deeper issues, a number of those are actually out of scope of technology. Instead, they are related to sociology, law, organization, public affairs, social system and regulations, as so on.

We were often pushed by the work we need to do. After working by ourselves for 4 days, we realized that we still need to synchronize with each other online. Thanks to the help and support from Alibaba, our core members had our first online communication through video meeting. This is a precious memory for us, especially in a peaceful era.

We can utilize all the technology and science knowledge we have since the beginning of the human history to solve the crisis we are facing together. We can use smartphones to collect and publish information. We have satellite maps to help us see where people are moving, and to which location. We have major progress in biology so that we can significantly shorten the time we need to find the cause of a disease, and to develop antidote and vaccine. We have all the equipment we need, but all of these need to be put together in a global health system, and require support from a functional information system. Hopefully, what we are doing today is helping people in the future to be fully prepared.

Simulation for 1918 Flu Pandemic spreading across the globe

WUHAN2020 Volunteer Recruitment

Welcome to join us, to win this war of the century.

At the end we quote our volunteer recruiting information to call on volunteers from all parts of the world to be part of us.

Latest volunteers please do leave your contact information and the group you wish to join, so that we can keep in touch and coordinate everyone. After you are assigned, please leave this group chat and join the specific groups you are assigned to and make your contribution!

Everyone should change your group alias into [nickname + group you wish to join].

The questionnaire links are as follows:

wuhan2020 open source project (Chinese Version):

https://shimo.im/forms/PWTTvkrdcCyXCGX6/fill

You can choose from:

Technology Group:

Project address: https://github.com/wuhan2020/wuhan2020
Communication platform: Slack (link in GitHub)
Information Group (Currently responsible for information fetching, input and reviewing. Provide data for back-end access and for technology group)
Publicity Group (In charge of publication of the project, as well as brand building, designing, copywriting and developing market channels)
Translation Group (Translation for news, publicity information and so on)
Product Group (Looking for volunteers with product related experience, preferably those under health and medication, information classification industry)
Coordination Group (In charge of coordinating collaboration among groups. This group requires a review before joining in)
Product experience Group (In charge of product analysis, interactive designing, experience and service designing and psychological assistance)

After a member of the coordination group publish invitation code for specific group, please leave the current group chat after join in the group you are assigned for.

We hope everyone can provide actual assistance for those people in the crisis, and not to make any mess by providing wrong information and data. Also we should not focus on promoting ourselves and violate the moral of this project. Thank you all for your help, and we hope we can survive this together.

PS: We promise to protect the privacy of your information and no information leakage is for sure.

Hope everyone can cooperate!!!