Volunteer
While the focus of Regional Relief is on encouraging donations and solidarity within Southeast Asia, we also wanted to highlight some ongoing global volunteer efforts that anyone with an internet connection can contribute to.
The situation is dynamic and the trajectory of the pandemic is not predetermined. There is a wide range of remote activity you can join; from contributing computer power to simulations to translating webpages with useful public health messages. Those with mechanical engineering or coding skills are further well-positioned to contribute to ongoing projects that attempt to produce more medical equipment and develop technological solutions to some of the urgent problems the world faces today.
The Coronavirus TechHandbook is probably one of the most extensive databases of COVID-related content at the moment and is worth checking out if you’re interested in devoting part of your time to helping combat this public health and economic crisis.
Folding at Home
Category
Folding at Home
For Everyone
Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It brings together citizen scientists who volunteer to run simulations of protein dynamics on their personal computers. Insights from this data are helping scientists to better understand biology, and providing new opportunities for developing therapeutics.
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EndCoronavirus
Category
EndCoronavirus
For Everyone
EndCoronavirus is a project run by Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute. Yaneer is an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. He advocates for a 5-week lockdown to crush the curve, providing backing policies and interventions for individuals, families, employers and governments. The EndCoronavirus community works on Slack and there are currently around 5,000 people translating the website into other languages and developing other applications that can help people make these policies work.
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CrowdFightCovid19
Category
CrowdFightCovid19
For Scientists
If you possess the requisite skills and can commit the necessary amount of time - you can become a crowdfighting coordinator linking different scientists to each other and helping them solve different parts of the COVID crisis.There is now a huge pool of highly skilled scientists, willing to volunteer their time and expertise for this cause. This goes from virologists who don't have the resources to get directly involved with COVID-19 to researchers in other disciplines (bioinformatics, image analysis, AI…). This is a huge resource, the "bottleneck" being coordination. This is a service for COVID-19 researchers. They only need to state a wish or a task, which can go from a simple time-intensive task to be performed (e.g. transcribe data, manually annotate images), to answering a technical question which is beyond their expertise, or to setting up a collaboration. They only need to explain their request in a few lines. Then, another scientist makes the effort of understanding that request and making it reality.
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Data-Against-Covid
Category
Data-Against-Covid
For Data Scientists
For those with data science, programming, lab, data-related legal skills, this is a group of skilled professionals looking to use their expertise to combat issues related to the pandemic.
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Coronavirus TechHandbook
Category
Coronavirus TechHandbook
Database
"The Coronavirus Tech Handbook provides a library for technologists, civic organisations, public and private institutions, researchers, educators and specialists of all kinds to collaborate on an agile and sophisticated response to the coronavirus outbreak and sequential impacts. It is a rapidly evolving resource with thousands of active expert contributors.”
This resource was created and is being managed by a tiny tech-for-good organisation in the UK that has dropped everything to work on this. They state that they will be bankrupt in 6 weeks. You can consider donating to them so that they can stay focused on improving the resource, by donating directly. You can also help by volunteering to help manage the rapidly growing handbook (be a librarian) or by looking for other specific volunteering/donation opportunities on these platforms. This is probably the largest aggregator of COVID related content at the moment. They run a general mailing list that you can join, and also have dedicated Whatsapp chats for specific sub-sections.
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HelpwithCovid
Category
HelpwithCovid
For those with Engineering or Coding Skills
This is a platform that calls for volunteers to work on specific projects. You can also list your projects and source for volunteers. Most listed projects require some kind of technical skill - either coding or engineering.
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LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database
Category
LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database
Database
A database with link organised by category - e.g. Science, DIY, Work&Donate
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Reddit Covid Projects
Category
Reddit Covid Projects
Database
A subreddit thread with links to many different ongoing COVID-related projects
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Reddit Coronavirus Army
Category
Reddit Coronavirus Army
Database
A subreddit thread with many different useful links to COVID-related information. There are also some links to projects that people can potentially help with.
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