L'call was launched by open science activists on the Internet in early March. In 15 days, the OpenCovid19 Initiative managed to gather 2500 participants: biohackers (biologists working outside institutions), academics, researchers, start-ups and community labs.
Supported by the online platform Just One Giant Lab (JOGL)), the project aims to develop open source diagnostic protocols for Covid-19 so that poor countries and small laboratories can have access to them. It is accompanied by a participatory science project (open to all) to monitor the spread of the virus in the environment.
Participants communicate primarily through a public Slack messaging channel and a weekly international audio or video teleconference.
The goal was initially to develop an open source (publicly shared) methodology to safely test the virus "using tools that are as common as possible".
Other projects that emerged from the forum included tracking the spread of the virus using open source software and finding more accessible ways to make free masks and ventilators, the devices that help sick patients breathe.
Just One Giant Lab (JOGL) is the first research and innovation lab operating as a massive, open, and distributed engagement platform to understand and solve our health, environmental, social, and humanitarian problems.
Update (March 20)
- More than 2500 contributors have joined the community 15 projects are now active, covering areas such as prevention (masks, filtered information, risk assessment...), diagnosis (patient testing, environmental monitoring, AI-based...), Treatment (ventilators, therapeutics...) The initiative on JOGL-Just One Giant Lab has been consulted by 44 000 people from 173 countries and 6464 cities OpenCovid19 has been contacted by a growing number of research labs and companies that want to join the initiative
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