Open Effort on Covid-19

In class on Monday, we had a discussion on the open-efforts regarding the current pandemic.

Open Efforts

In Monday’s lecture, we talked about our findings about the open efforts on the current COVID-19 pandemic. I think it is very interesting, as Selam mentioned in class, that the projects are able to be categorized into open sourced predictions and data sets. This coincides with my findings as well, because when I browse through what my classmates has put into the wiki page, many of them appears to be very alike to me. Carsen also mentioned that there are many open resource already available on the net, which cuaght my attention previously as well. I did not think that since the pandemic has bursted no longer than 2 month, there are not going to lots of data available. However, Priya mentioned that many of the sites were used for different purposes prior to the site, so not everything had to be built from scratch. It is a good thing that we are able to use available resources to hold new data, and utilize them efficiently to help others who need it. One of the open project is meant to coach people how to build their own covid test kit. This is a bit of a outlier, since I think most of the websites are helpful and useful in many ways. However, this one I did not think I would recommend to anyone, nor would I test it myself. I think this shows an important side of open source projects, which is that though people are creating and are allowed to contribute to, no one is monitoring all the projects at the same time. So it comes to our personal judgement to decide which projects are useful, or even safe to use. And it comes to our own risk to pick what we want to contribute to or potentially use in the future.

Different Open Source Projects on Covid-19

We went through our findings on the different projects one by one on zoom in class, and I have discovered, through the introductions of my classmates, I got the chance to learn about many interesting projects. Some of the projects focuses on collecting datasets on current cases, including the one that I put into the list, which collects data from state public health authorities, news reporting, press conferences, and even (rarely) in tweets and facebook updates, etc. The data are taken in forms of spreadsheets, or in APIs, depends on what potential user wants to utilize it for. I have browsed their past data, and find a very detailed data set for each state. It seems like a very useful tool for potentially graphing a Covid map to visualize the severity of the disease. Or to graph the line chart to see where the disease is going.

Projects we are working on

We had a group meeting on Wednesday, where we discussed the plan for this week and what each of us should work on. We agreed on the issue we would fix for Gatsby this week, which is to send a warning when the page context exceeds the page limit. During our group meeting, Emmet mentions that we should first try to use GitPod to share our coding progress. I think this is a great idea, since we have not used it prior to this project, and it is exciting to be able to learn something new while making our contributions. We do not know for now how exactly we can work on an issue (or just editing a block of code simultaneously. We planned to have another meeting Sunday to discuss it.