Crowd-fight COVID-19 — donate your time to humanity in these difficult times!

This is a very cool initiative, and I took the liberty to completely copy+paste the information from their — please sign up if you are a researcher!

Motivation: Most current plans to fight covid-19 rely on the assumption that treatments and/or vaccines will be available in a few months. Delays in these treatments will have enormous consequences, both in terms of economic impact and human lives.

Aim: Put the wider scientific community at the service of COVID-19 research.

Context: 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.

Our proposal: 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 that is beyond their expertise or to set up a collaboration. They only need to explain their request in a few lines. Then, another scientist makes an effort of understanding that request and making it a reality.

Of course, everything is free. This platform works thanks to scientists who donate their time and skill in these times of emergency.

If you want to participate or benefit from this initiative go to their website at: https://crowdfightcovid19.org/

Originally published at https://www.bpetersen.dk on March 22, 2020.