January 25th, the first day of Chinese New Year in 2020, marks the day that the official commencement of the open-source project of wuhan2020: information collection platform for Wuhan 2019-nCov epidemic prevention. Developers are supporting the war without violence in our own ways. By 17:00 Jan 27, 2020, 2823 confirmed, 5794 suspected, 55 cured cases and 81 death were reported all over the country. It was a tough situation.
According to the reports on 2019-nCov, supplies in Wuhan and nearby counties have been insufficient. However, public health incidents are well-acknowledged as one of the most complicated public incidents given that the difficulty in the arrangement and the length of the incidents. With the help of digital information platforms, the efficiency of communication among suppliers and demanders through distributed and automatic interfaces would largely improve. Besides, due to the difference between the current info collection approach and the existing publication platforms, data was largely dispersed and a large amount of picture information is very ineffective in real-time communication. Hence, the project aims at unifying the information collected by different departments, reporting real-time data through open-source and distributed collaboration and connecting different parties through the digital platform. The central idea of the project is to collect information from the open public. After verification, the data collected will be pushed into the code repository with the source of the data. We are trying our best to ensure the authenticity of the original data and meet the regularities. Please see the official notification for wuhan2020 open source collaboration for more details.
It’s what we software developers and engineers are good at to support the fight with digitization and technology and we are never too tired to lend our hands.
Even on the first day of the battle, we acquired supports from multiple communities, especially “Datawhale” and “开源社” where many developers volunteered to join our project and take action.
After only two days, we figured out a complete system of operation and each doing their own job: info collectors are our sentries who gather all the information from different sources while the software developers are consistently working with programs and project design.
We firmly believe that digitization leads to the future and the transparency of the information is the prerequisite for winning the war, even during the time where viruses spread at large; It is also what makes us developers.
With Git, developers could massively collaborate and communicate with each other without even going out of their own rooms.
The numbers are still rising and here is our first open-source contribution report from the GitHub bot:
There were 18 contributors and we sincerely appreciate their support! We are looking for more contributors to join!
At the same time, our first article is attracting eyeballs from multiple official personal and community WeChat accounts; they are actively supporting and sharing our articles which lead to more than 140k hits (among which, 90k views came from community sharing). We would like to express our gratitude to them! Thank you very much!
At the same time, we would also love to say thank you to the tech communities who armed developers with their weapons that made the project possible. We can’t do it without you!
In the end, we are calling on software developers and engineers to join us in the project:
Dev team: software developers and engineers
Info team: information collectors, online information collectors, first-hand information collectors
Verification team: professionals and government officials, we need you to protect the authenticity of the data collected
Publicity team: Any approach that you can think of, including but not limited to official WeChat account, Weibo, Toutiao, TikTok
Coordination team: help coordinate all the teams above
Volunteers for dev team please join the Slack chat:
Volunteers for all other teams please leave a message beneath, indicating your specialties, resources and the team you want to join.
By the way, if anyone wants to contribute, we need a logo for our project. Many thanks for the designer in advance!
Let’s join hands and fight the disease!