PyData Boston has gone virtual! And for this event, we want you, our community to join us to help address the global pandemic of COVID-19.

The current global situation has brought challenges to extract useful information from a wide variety of datasets. There are a number of open calls for assistance from people with different skillsets to help support the fight:

The White House's call to action to the tech community: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/call-action-tech-community-new-machine-readable-covid-19-dataset/

In collaboration with Kaggle and the Allen Institute, a data challenge has been opened to the public: https://www.kaggle.com/allen-institute-for-ai/CORD-19-research-challenge

The challenge consists of the following tasks:

• What is known about transmission, incubation, and environmental stability?
• What do we know about COVID-19 risk factors?
• What do we know about virus genetics, origin, and evolution?
• Help us understand how geography affects virality.
• What do we know about vaccines and therapeutics?
• What do we know about non-pharmaceutical interventions?
• What do we know about diagnostics and surveillance?
• What has been published about ethical and social science considerations?
• What has been published about medical care?
• What has been published about information sharing and inter-sectoral collaboration?

Teams will also be encouraged to take on other tasks such as the ones on this list: https://helpwithcovid.com/projects

Or to help JHU's Center for Systems Science with the issues on their github repo: https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19

======================================================
How:

The hackathon will be held online on zoom and participants will be able to coordinate via slack. Individual teams will need to coordinate using zoom or Google Hangouts.

Join us on slack: http://bit.ly/pydatabos-slack
If you want to help coordinate, join #e-covid-hack

======================================================
Agenda:

10:00am - 10:30am: Projects explanation. We will discuss some of the current ideas to tackle on the day, at this point you will be able to select what project you are the most interested in helping with.
10:30am - 11:00am: Team formation. Teams will be given a zoom invite and new slack channels might be created to help with collaboration.
11:00am - 3:30pm: Hacking.
3:30pm - 4:30pm: We will gather again in a main zoom channel, so teams can present what they were able to accomplish during the day and propose next steps.

======================================================
Resources:

Whether or not you're able to join us, here are some resources for getting involved:

Kaggle challenge: https://www.kaggle.com/allen-institute-for-ai/CORD-19-research-challenge

List of other volunteer opportunities: https://helpwithcovid.com/projects

Sign up to be a digital volunteer: https://www.usdigitalresponse.org/

Free DataRobot resources for working on this researchg: https://www.datarobot.com/lp/covid-19-response-effort/

Great general list of resources: https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/home