Covid-19 Global Hackathon Ending & Beginning - COVID-19 Global Hackathon 1.0

All,

I am overwhelmed by what just happened in a few short days. From an initial set of participants in the silicon valley community, this hack became an effort by over 18,000 participants around the globe who created and submitted more than 1,500 projects.

It is so deeply clear that there is so much energy that the global tech community is ready, willing, and able to help in this crisis -- and so so many great ideas out there in terms of how to help.

I could wax poetic on this for a while, but I will keep this brief and directly informative about where these projects and this community can go from here. Here are some thoughts on where we go next:

THE PROJECTS

Conducting Review, Offering Feedback, and Highlighting The Work Done

All 1,500 projects will be reviewed by technology and health / public sector leaders in the coming days. We will be getting back to teams with feedback, and helping route select projects to organizations looking for solutions. We will also highlight several projects by theme in the hopes that they can connect with organizations who could partner with them beyond this hackathon.

THE PARTICIPANTS

Helping People Find the Next Most Impactful Step they Can Take 

For those that are interested, we hope that participating in this hackathon will be just the beginning of their involvement in working on covid-19 related problems. Some of you may choose to continue the work you started in the last few days. Others might decide to look for other ways to help. We want to support the community and help those that are interested find highly impactful project opportunities, and match their skills with the biggest needs in the community.

THE CONVERSATION

Keeping the Discussion Going on Slack

A good percentage of the participants in this event chose to take advantage of the slack community we created to help organize the event. There is no reason for the discussion in slack to end. If you haven’t joined the slack yet you are still welcome to here and in the coming days look for us to create some channels and pivot the way the community works to support longer-term thematic discussions on how to engage with the Covid-19 crisis.

Look for more from the organizers in the coming days, but for now I want to close by thanking a few people. Thank you first and foremost to all of you that participated over the last few days from all around the world.  Your hard work, ingenuity, and passion to help is deeply inspiring. We appreciate the tech companies that rallied behind this event, including AWS, Cognizant, Facebook, Giphy, Microsoft, Pinterest, Slack, Salesforce, TikTok, Twilio, Twitter, and WeChat. We value the startup communities for engaging, including Slow Ventures (my fund), South Park Commons, Neo, 8VC, Homebrew, and many more. And thank you to student groups like Hack Club and The Congressional App Challenge for getting young and passionate builders activated.

This event dramatically exceeded all our expectations. And we hope this is just the start of the journey for many of the people that participated and projects people worked on.