COVID-19 Open Efforts

In Monday’s lecture we had a discussion on the open efforts regarding COVID-19. The project I added to the wiki page was the COVID-19 Open-Source Helpdesk. I learned about this project on social media half a month ago, and it sounded like an exciting idea to be able to help health professionals with one’s knowledge in open-source scientific computing. However, the project doesn’t seem to be very active, and not many people are actually asking for help on the forum. Compared to GitHub Issues or Stack Overflow, the user base of the project is too small to achieve its goals of offering timely help for domain experts fighting COVID-19.

I found MIT’s Safe Paths and the similar mobile app developed by the Indian government mentioned by Nishant very interesting. The idea of using location data to let the users know if they have crossed paths with someone later test positive reminds me of China’s Health Code System which has similar mechanisms. While it might be nice to be informed about the risks of infection, the privacy issues behind the scenes can be quite worrisome.

We also talked about Humanitarian Free and Open Source (HFOSS) projects and projects for social good. I was kinda surprised when I learned that “helping others” is the highest rated career value for both undergraduate and graduate students in computing fields (I would expect something like “making important decisions at work” or “social impact” to be ranked higher). I was wondering what the rankings will look like for students majoring in other fields. I also liked the alignment of open source values to humanitarian values. I’ve never thought about the similarities shared by the two, so the discussion was very refreshing to me.

Lemmy

This week our group had a meeting to decide on the issues we would like to tackle. After browsing the issues tab of Lemmy together, we were interested in issue #625 which is to break out API files into their own modules since the API files are getting too long. We had a discussion on how should we reorganize the structs and functions based on their functionalities and which API files should each of us work on. However, after Charlie left a comment under the issue asking for more clarification, the maintainers replied that we should not try to work on this now as they don’t wanna do any reorgs until federation is mostly done.

Another issue we looked at was issue #639 on back end code cleanup. Basically the maintainers would like to replace all the instances of unwrap, is_some, is_ok, is_err with match or if let to avoid crashing the program. This doesn’t look too difficult to work on and the maintainer also agreed that it would be a good first issue. I’ve been reading Rust documentation to get a better understanding of error handling in Rust. We will be having another meeting to take a crack at this issue soon, and I hope that we can make some progress.

I also helped with translating at Lemmy’s Weblate this week. I added/edited the translations of 160+ strings in both simplified Chinese and Japanese.

Translating from English to my native language has been more difficult and time-consuming than I expected. It was hard to find an equivalent of “NSFW” in Chinese that does not sound strange to me. Meanwhile, I googled a lot when translating into Japanese in order to make sure that my translations sound natural. Thanks to the existence of Gairaigo (“loan word”, a transliteration into Japanese), I can simply translate “community” to “コミュニティ(komyuniti)” and “comment” to “コメント(komento)”, which had made things much easier for me.

Individual Contributions

I started to make more contributions to Wikipedia after the lecture on Wikipedia last week. I found that for many terms that are not very frequently viewed, there’s usually a time lag between the information available in different languages. For example, for a foreign actor, the Wiki page in his native language is likely to be more up-to-date than the corresponding Wiki page in English. I’ve been taking advantage of such a time lag to make contributions.

I also made translation contributions to the Tokyo COVID-19 Task Force website over this past week. I translated 100+ strings from Japanese to English and 140+ strings from Japanese to simplified Chinese. Since most of the untranslated strings were names of places in Tokyo, Wikipedia has been really helpful in the translating process. I would just google the name, open its Wikipedia page and then switch to another language. An unexpected gain was that I’ve become so familiar with the names of the 23 special wards of Tokyo and the Tokyo Islands, for the reason that I’ve translated each of them 4 times by far (the names were written in both Hiragana and Kanji, which are two different Japanese writing systems).