This week we discussed various open efforts regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to this class I actually found a bunch of open source projects on Github regarding the pandemic since my group and I were trying to find an open source project to work on for our final project. When looking around for a project, we went to the Github explore page and the trending section and found that around a quarter of the projects that were on the trending list had something to do with the coronavirus. The projects were in a variety of forms - APIs, CLIs, visualizers etc. During our class research on open efforts regarding the coronavirus, some of these categories showed up.

What kinds of open source projects are there for COVID-19?

One of the projects that surprised me the most was an open source homemade ventilator design. This ventilator is designed to only be around $100 to make, while industrial ventilators can reach around $30,000!!! I was surprised that this is an open source project because I thought it would be very hard to collaborate and construct this ventilator since all of us have to practice social-distancing. I believe that this is considered open source since using the design is completely free to use and anybody can construct the ventilator.

In terms of the other projects, a lot of them were APIs and data visualizers. It is cool to see that there are so many efforts to provide data on the coronavirus, but I had the impression that a lot of them were very similar to each other. I’d imagine that they are getting their data from the same sources, but just possibly presenting them differently. This made me question the usefulness of some of these open source projects, and sort of being a devils advocate, made me think that these projects were mostly only formed as something the contributers can show off, instead of a platform for social good. This is why I appreciated the open source project about the ventilator so much since it directly helps people in need and is unique in that not everyone is doing the same thing.

Contributions

This week I made a contribution to p5.js regarding a broken link. I thought this contribution was pretty rewarding since the problem wasn’t just that there was a typo. To fix this I had to scour the repository of the p5.js website for a few hours to find how they are passing in data to their template pages. This took a while since I had to get used to the repository structure. Once I found how they are passing in data, I had to modify the data being passed in so that on the website the broken link issue is fixed.

This issue took a while to complete and is not very flashy, but I am proud of it because it really forced me to get a much better understanding about how the code behind their website works and proved to myself that I could read the code that others have written.

In terms of contributions for next week, I plan on finding one more big thing to contribute to p5.js before the final presentation comes around. I feel as though our group right now is making great progress and I think we are in a good place right now. For my individual contributions I am also going to be looking into some of the COVID-19 open source projects more. Although I do not think that some of them are the most useful to the society as a whole, I think that they are great resources to contribute to since a lot of them are very new projects :D

See you next week!