I’ve been following the news and discussing the Coronavirus epidemic almost non-stop this week. Here in Switzerland we planned to celebrate Open Data Day with an energy-themed hackathon this weekend. Despite already having received permission from the health authorities, the increasing concerns and cancellations have us shifting into Plan B.
I believe the Open Knowledge network has an opportunity here to show itself this weekend in the best light. We are all about making the world a more connected place and overcome frustrations.
I’m inspired by all of you here, especially the many of you who continue to commit time and resources to the world’s critical challenges - including that of providing fact checking, data and guidance for the public health community. So if you have any suggestions of how you plan to make the most of the occasion while staying at home or in the office, please share them!
Hi @loleg. Thanks for sharing this. Have you definitely made the decision to shift your hackathon to being a remote event? If so, there have been some interesting links shared in the UK from people who want to help others with remote formats and ways of working.
@rufuspollock I’m reluctant to start another channel at this stage as we have already been promoting the Google group, using discuss.okfn.org and telling people to post using the #OpenDataDay and #ODD2020 hashtags to share information. And there are only so many places I’ll be able to monitor today and tomorrow!
If I see anyone on any platform needing technical support or appealing for help, we’ve agreed that the Datopian team will be on hand in the Datahub.io gitter channel so I’ll be pointing people to that or sharing the Datopian blogpost where Paul shared useful resources.
Do you think you could tweet that out today? So people know where to come if they want realtime chat?
I will be on there and happy to help people if one more channel would be too much!
Regarding another channel: I really hear you on the general point. Fewer is better. However, here there’s a big difference between an email group (or this forum) and a chat channel: one is async the other is pseudo-realtime and allows people to collaborate.
I was personally asking b/c it was not really to me from the site how one could connect with others virtually on the day (esp given there could be quite a lot of people who were virtual b/c of the virus etc).
PS: I’m not talking here about DataHub.io specific stuff - i’m talking about the general day.
/cc @loleg - i’ll be hanging on that chat channel.
Hello folks, thanks for letting me know about the chat channel. To be honest, it was quite challenging to keep chins up after plans fell through, and various ideas like connecting our events over video and contributing to more global themes didn’t happen. It’s great that we are on similar wavelengths, and awesome to see the initiative here to put together an open data dashboard about the epidemic. I wrote some thoughts up last night:
Again, with apologies for omitting to cross-post (off topic: can Discourse federate?), the results of our online-only event this Open Data Day along with a write-up on the setup are on my blog. Hope you had a great time today & warm greetings from .CH
