OpenCell, BioCurious: Results from COVID-19 Virtual Hackathons?

[Tito]

Hi,

When Thomas from OpenCell announced its COVID-19 virtual hackathon here on January 21st there were 415 cases worldwide. 

415 cases, who cares? At that point COVID-19 seemed kind of on the fringe, back when it was called the Wuhan coronavirus.

Today, 39 days later, COVID-19 is no longer on the fringe. Today there are tens of thousands of documented cases, and 2,933 documented deaths.

Huge props to the OpenCell team including Thomas Meany, and the BioCurious team including Maria Chavez for hosting these virtual hackathons so early on.

Maria, Thomas, and attendees, could you please share out how the events went? I'm imagining a lot of discussion and questions, probably not much action coming out of it but that's ok. Your early experience with this will be very helpful to others who follow in your example. 

I'm curious about:

• What kind of questions did people discuss?
• A month later, did the event spark any actions?
• Got a recording to share?

I imagine pretty much every community lab will be thinking about doing something related. When I saw Maria's comments in the PCR thread about asking the right questions, I wanted to get feedback from people who have already hosted events.

Also to both of you, what's next?

References:

OpenCell hosted a virtual meetup on Jan 26th: https://www.opencell.bio/biohackathons

BioCurious did a virtual hackathon/co-learning event on Feb 1st: https://www.meetup.com/BioCurious/events/268159598/

Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab (SZOIL) just announced Hack for Wuhan (https://www.bagevent.com/event/6368833)

Cheers,

Tito