Midnight Engineering, formal success, and the Q3 report...

[Robert Read]

Dear Team,

There is a board meeting in a few hours, and two things have happened that I though were worth mentioning...

As you may know I recently shipped out the 20th VentMon free of charge, this one to the PolyVent team in Europe/Austria.  The City of Linz Austria has given them a super-nice maker space to work in as part of its attempt to become a European tech hub. But they don't have access to the router there, since they don't own it, so they couldn't plug the VentMon into the data lake. When they let me know, I started furiously hacking a firmware modification to use WiFI. This was at Midnight in Austria---and we got it working. This morning the demoed their ventilator, with a live data feed from the VentMon, to the Mayor of Linz, and apparently it really well!

By coincidence, today I spoke to two graduate students and the Fraunhoffer Institute in Germany, who have interviewed 14 open-source pandemic ventilator teams based on the COVID-Vent-List that Avinash, Keeshan, Enrique and I made. They are about done, and this will be a part of the dissertations and probably they will try to publish some of it in conferences as well. I think it "tells a story" of the open source community stepping up to solve this problem---though with only mixed success. I'm proud Public Invention was an important part of this research.

Here's the Q3 report. I have to say in putting it together I was pretty astounded at the amount of work Public Invention has done---I think it is a good read or at least a good skim.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ebn9RqZ-w7T5inEKRxiUVh4azzqv0gHtjAGsB-SFu4A/edit?usp=sharing