Resource 19

Inspiration

How do we get vital medical supplies to the people who need them the most and how do we mobilize the existing community of manufacturers, makers, and builders to ensure these vital supplies never run out? As we watched the pandemic unfold in other countries, saw immense value in preparing for the challenges yet to come. Only a month ago, news of a “movement” that makers were making individual efforts donating Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), ventilator parts, or medical devices to hospitals. As the maker community grew to involve more people donating supplies, we immediately saw gaps between getting these supplies to hospitals. Our call to action, was creating a platform connecting donation sites including hospitals, clinics, doctors offices, etc. to a maker community of over 40 certified and non-certified, open sourced designs for making Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).

It’s been a privilege to have worked in the past with a majority of these individuals as a college student through a non-profit, student-led organization called the Invention Corps. For the past 3 years, we’ve used design thinking to build solutions to poverty, society, health and the environment by partnering with professors, organizations, and companies. Since reuniting under a problem that affects us all, we’ve made it our mission to create technologies that respond to the individual, societal, educational, political, economic, environmental challenges brought by the pandemic. We especially want to highlight the excellence displayed by the students driving these projects.

What it does

Resource 19 alleviates the pains any maker, new or experienced, feels when trying to produce and deliver PPE to people in need. It does the work of displaying local hospitals in need through an easy to use map interface. It shares best practices for getting started, so makers can produce the best quality products possible. Finally, it displays designs sourced from around the maker community sorted by certification to show which designs have been approved to make by accredited institutions such as the NIH, CDC, and the ECDC. All of this serves the goal of easily starting makers on the path of creating PPE with the fewest possible headaches.

How I built it

Technologies we've used: -Converted most of the components from regular JS to react -Implemented a login flow for users -Made changes to the API to allow for categorizing by organization type (more related to Joey's project but maybe we could still demo it) -Integrated current hospitals API with the decision flow

No new frameworks used, but past frameworks include: -Firebase -Google analytics -React -Jquery -Several npm librarires -Zeit.co for online hosting and serverless functions

At the start of the pandemic we met on the daily basis with our team to sync up with the team and overall efforts. We now hold weekly Sunday All Hands and Tuesday Stand Ups to report our project's status and next steps

Challenges I ran into

We want Resource 19 to be a tool that can blend into the background of the lives of makers. However, the amount of information hosted on the website can seem daunting even to a maker with experience. A challenge for us has been thinking about how to display the information in a fashion where our users are never forced to think too hard. One of our biggest challenges was how could we implement a human centered design in order to serve the purpose of maximizing the utility of Resource 19.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

From meeting just 3 weeks ago to releasing this past week Resource 19 as had over 3000 users who have donated over 50k masks and 400 face shields, plus 30 open source designs for medical devices and parts, to over 3.8k donation site listings. We are currently adding additional features like tracking the number of donations sent to hospitals, implementing features to better connecting individual makers to join hospitals, building functionality to expand to donation sites outside of the United States, implementing hotjar tracking, and optimizing for mobile.

What I learned

Live Coding - A framework developed for agile development and fast releases

Developed a new API using our product to be used for our community https://COVID-19-HOSPITALS.NOW.SH

The fast changing environment and the importance of a team for collaborative action.

How to start a non-profit.

Applying quick thinking and grassroots methodologies and corporate intraprenuership.

How to lead organizational structures to fit scale of distribution.

What's next for Resource 19

We hope to continue our expansion that began just a few weeks ago and begin to move outwards to serve not just the United States but the entire international community. Around the world, hospitals are experiencing shortages of PPE and many impoverished countries are ill equipped to gain access to the traditional global supply chain to fulfill their needs. We hope Resource 19 can help fill part of the shortage being felt by those countries by mobilizing makers around the world for a cause we can all agree is worth fighting for.