Hi,
I'm interested in responding to your comment.
>Not to be overly dismissive, but my first impression is that you have a bunch of devs finding something interesting and wanting to follow along rather than a key cohort of people who will "disrupt covid-19."
The group was founded with the intention of coordinating mechanical engineers and medical clinicians to build physical devices.
For the developers and engineers coming in, most state they have considerable mechanical or device background. It's possible that the value of some of these people is low. I don’t think so. I'm not willing to have to pay the admin costs and externalities of gatekeeping access right now.
To be clear, I think we're conscious of the challenges and ways we can fail. In actively figuring out designs or devices to build, we're trying to organize hundreds of disparate people. One of our admins seemed to just have pulled a 24 hour day, and most of us have regular jobs. I think there's an underlying assumption that we only have a short period of time. We may fail but we want to give the best effort we can.
I agree with your premise, that engineering help alone is insufficient. We have a dozen doctors who trickled in but a major deficit is medical clinicians with organized opinion to advise us. These people may become fewer and less available in the weeks to come.
NOTE
Please contact us (email in profile) if you are a clinician who has insights in what is needed in a situation where there is a vast surplus of patients in respiratory distress, or other ways we can help (e.g. we have heard requests for PPE needs from clinicians). Note that one reason we need multiple opinions is because of the different cultures and organizations that might exist in emergency environments.
>If you have hundreds of members, why not ask each for a couple of dollars to cover slack costs?
I’m not uncomfortable raising money, but right now, the organizational demands are extreme. I'm unwilling to add to this by having some sort of finance committee and managing the ethics and optics of raising money.
Also, narrative is important and raising say, X dollars for operations could affect efforts to raise 100X dollars to actually build medical devices to alleviate suffering or reduce the burden on clinicians.
>I don't see why Slack should pay for a bunch of people to use their platform. They are in the business of making money, and offer reduced costs for non-profits. If that doesn't work for you, use something else.
There's significant costs Slack incurs to engineer and build its services. We're grateful for this.
However, the marginal cost to slack from our existence and activities seems to be about the same as this discussion is to HN.
> Or use a different platform. Or self host something else.
I'm not sure there's a lock in effect, but given our presumption of urgency, we couldn't migrate without losing many hours of everyone's time, admin resources, etc. The culture here among engineers seems to prefer Slack and I expect there would be abundant residual effects from a change.
Charles He