Thanks to the HWC community for help. With it, we got an opportunity to launch our mobile app COVID-19 Contact Tracer. A bunch of volunteers helped us with the design of the web-site and upcoming version of iOS version of the application. HWC community was a starting point for the next successful events like the selection to the UNESCO CodeTheCurve hackathon finals, 3rd place on TechStars hackathon and 2nd product of the day on ProductHunt. Finally, without the impulse of the international community, we wouldn’t have reached 50,000+ user of the app across the world!

Right when HWC launched I put three projects on the site.

School Closures, a free hotline and website with information for families impacted by school closures, PPE Coalition, an umbrella group made up of the largest entities working on solving the PPE shortage, and Good News Daily which shares a bit of hope & good stories in the time of social distancing daily.

Through HWC, I was able to place hundreds of volunteers in short order. The site and team have been very helpful bringing new energy into the ecosystem and shining a light on all the good work going on.

The HelpWithCovid.com website has accelerated our project Vital Sign AI incredibly. Within days, it has allowed us to form a team of 100+ volunteering healthcare professionals, data scientists, engineers and researchers from universities such as Stanford, UCLA, Oxford, NYU and all over the world.

The global exchanges from all over the world has enabled an expertise dialogue on machine learning models and latest COVID-19 scientific papers to evaluate the most efficient approach. The research and development has benefitted from all insights, and we have also been receiving institutional and industry interest into our app and project on a daily basis.

Aside from the team formation in multiple group of medical and technical experts and progress on R&D, the exchanges with other projects in HWC and mentors have been invaluable.

The HWC platform has been excellent and we have benefited a lot from the website. The most useful components have been the office hours and the discord.

I have attended 3 office hour sessions so far. We have taken the advice about how to structure our time bw fundraising and prototype building. Excellent! Excellent advice!! Our project information has been requested 3 separate times to share for fundraising purposes. I found a volunteer startup lawyer to answer some key questions. He may provide long term help.

The discord was eminently helpful for immediate communication. We have applied for YC and we augmented the application about 2 weeks ago indicating our pivot from our QXD-1 Fast test for pseudomonal pneumonia to our QXD-3 Fast test for Covid. It was a little bit challenging finding volunteers at first, kinda like swimming in the sea looking for volunteers on the other side. Ultimately, I did find the help I need for at least one of my challenges.

I joined the covid-19 supplies discord group. While I wasn't a super active member, seeing the resources and insights shared helped us understand how to define the problem and solution. For instance, I found out about a number of supply sources and ways to donate to hospitals.

My name is Hannah & I am the project owner of Fund COVID - we are working on connecting investors with promising COVID-19 projects via 30 minute, weekly demo days.

The HWC community has provided every critical resource that has made working on a project like this possible - volunteers, expertise, community, accountability, & the list goes on...

The general existence of HWC gave me the push I needed to start this project & confidence in knowing I could build something upon their framework.

The world will thank you for this platform and the solutions that will emerge from it.

Help With COVID brought together over 100 volunteers to help match medical personnel with hospitals in need. In two weeks we were able to test, build, and launch an MVP product. We’ve partnered with Southwest Airlines, IHG Hotels, and Egencia to coordinate any volunteer travel for free. This month we’ve partnered with ten hospitals in need of volunteer & full-time support created by vacancies caused by COVID-19. The team is continuing to grow and we plan to be moving clinicians all over the country to help hospitals respond faster to surge staffing requirements.

HWC helped us find amazing developers, marketers, designers, and above all—People. I’ve never been a part of a team that came together so fast and began producing results quickly. Thanks HWC for helping us at ApolloHCT.com!

We were going to build the Childhood Cancer Directory later (and not for this pandemic), but HWC changed our priorities. For the past few weeks, we have been focussed on building this directory. Moreover, the HWC community and its leaders are responsive and fast. Your speediness has been contagious and as a result we feel more urgency. We have been working very hard. We will be deploying the directory within the next 8 days.

Finally, the AWS credits alleviated our financial stress! Overall, HWC strengthened Guardiome. Thank you very much.

HWC has helped us so much to bring "wellyou in hard times" forward. We are really enjoying and learning so much from the panel discussions, office hours and AMAs.

Through the HWC platform, we have connected to so many wonderful, warm-hearted, and helpful individuals for which we will always be so grateful. We have made connections with people that we hope will span beyond this project. Currently, we have 13 volunteers from HWC on board (not 73 as seen on the platform) helping us with content writing/brainstorming, proofreading and UX/UI/graphic design - all for “wellyou in hard times.”

Every single person who has joined our team as a volunteer from HWC puts a smile on our faces and warms our hearts when we think of them. They are all so unique but one thing they have in common is their kindness and willingness to do whatever they can to make a positive impact. They make our team even fuller and brighter and although we can write extensively about every one of them, here are some examples:

Ariane: product development specialist who may be the funniest woman we ever met. She had us laughing during our entire 1.5-hour skype call and at the end of our follow-up email, we wrote: “To be honest, can we just be friends so that we can have you in our lives?”

Anusha: A young 20-year old woman who lives in a small city/village (?) in India who melted our hearts when she told us that she turned to the internet to find a community to help because her local community is too small and offers no opportunities.

Andy: A young Californian who is at the beginning of his UX/UI career and is really passionate about user research. He has already conducted a survey for our project asking Americans “how they feel during this crisis” and “what they would like to be informed about.” Along with our other UX/UI volunteers conducting user research, he will be supervised by our advisor, Hans, who worked at the Deutsche Telekom HQ in Cologne for 7 years in various roles including Head of UX. Andy has also expressed interest to intern with us at a later stage.

Chris: An Australian who was one of the first volunteers who reached out to us. As a designer, he has designed and built our “wellyou in hard times” landing page, bringing in a refreshing new look. We will have the page online very soon!

Katy: We had a call with her today. She is a health sciences student and when we explained to her our (above-mentioned) reservations of going forward with the Android development, she came up with a great idea. Why not create something on the web? That hadn't crossed our minds before...

Keeley: A psychology graduate who is also at the beginning of her UX/UI career. We told her to use our project as a playground to try out new things and improve her design skills. While creating illustrations for one of our deep-dive topics, she noticed that the text could use minor adjustments to make it sound more colloquial to the American reader (indeed, it was written by our Dutch intern). Thanks to her, the piece of text is ready for the English native speaker.

With urgency and clear-sighted strategy, HWC set about transforming the way that humanity can mobilise and respond to COVID-19 from critically early on in the crisis. From this brilliant start to this moment in time, tens of thousands of volunteers have joined together as HWC aids ever more vital and life-saving projects all across the world. All Probono are just one of those groups who owe so much gratitude to such a fantastic community. Thank you!

A few of the countless ways in which the HWC network has aided one team:

Sharing bespoke and highly experienced advice, alongside heartfelt and inspiring encouragement, with our team as we develop and scale (as well as being such a model of excellence to learn from!).

Rapidly speeding up the process where so many people are able to find a project they love in a time when so many long to help protect and save lives. For our volunteers and so many more, Help With Covid couldn’t have been more of a gift to find.

Acting as a hive where committed volunteers from across the globe can collaborate together and all whilst caring for this community so immaculately. The HWC community has welcomed and nurtured so many volunteers and projects just like ours. Thank you for the care and wonderful aid you have shared with us all!

With gratitude,

Our team at All Probono

With the help of the HWC community, we have collected, organized, and published hundreds of service manuals for essential medical equipment. This resource is already proving valuable for biomedical repair technicians on the front lines. The treasurers of Colorado, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Delaware, and Rhode Island have followed up on our work and asked ventilator manufacturers to release key service information hospitals need to maintain their equipment. Their joint statement demands manufacturers “release all service manuals, service keys, and schematics during this crisis, enabling hospitals to make repairs to ventilator and maximize their supply and ability to serve more COVID-19 patients.” Now, ventilator manufacturers GE, Fisher & Paykal, and Medtronic have made it easier to access the repair manuals and other service informationhospitals need to repair broken ventilators.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/36899/five-state-treasurers-demand-the-right-to-repair-from-ventilator-makers

But we’re not done! We have thousands more files that our librarian and archivist community volunteers are organizing and uploading for other essential medical equipment.

With the help of HWC, ClinWiki.org has been able to leverage our already existing tool and quickly build a community around COVID-19 trials. By posting our clinical trials tracker project on HWC, we have been able to gather a group of 10 passionate and engaged volunteers who have been instrumental to the success of this project. Together, we have already reviewed 350+ clinical trials and added key word descriptors to make them easier to find and filter. This information has also been useful when looking at the data as a whole and has allowed us to be able to create some interesting and insightful graphics for a blog post titled COVID-19 Clinical Trials Growing Exponentially. We would not have been able to connect with such a diverse group of people without HWC.

I think the HWC community is the most valuable asset on the internet right now. The whole world is going to spend trillions of $ to fight COVID-19, and HWC has the intellectual value that can beat COVID-19. It's an amazing thing to watch and be a part of this community.

Over the past month, our project has formed a team of over 130 talented volunteers from around the world. We've received $10k in AWS credits, got 6 months of Figma Teams for free, and learned valuable lessons about managing large open source projects.

One quick "win" for us -- Shortly after our core team came together, we entered a Techstars hackathon and came in 3rd out of 60 teams!