K-Team Money Mesh: EUvsVirus

What's the problem?

Many funders of the anti-COVID fight are announcing calls for proposals and other funding opportunities that those they wish to finance never learn about. This is because there is no central information source to which experts capable of responding to those opportunities can turn to learn about them. The result is that valuable ideas go unfunded, and scarce resources are spent inefficiently. This is not acceptable when rapid exploration of potential solutions to COVID-created problems is needed and when the economic devastation that the disease causes makes every Euro count. The new EIC COVID platform will likely address aspects of the problem that we have identified, but will not alone solve it. Among other things, there are many other institutions worldwide (WHO, World Bank. . ) providing COVID-related funding.

The solution

A software tool that enables sources of finance and others to enter information about COVID-19-related projects (including EU, national and other calls) that they are sponsoring or of which they are aware into a searchable database which can then be accessed by entities and individuals that are interested in responding to such calls.

The tool should be available both as a website and a mobile app, should be easy to use and should provide accurate, actionable and timely information. It requires a front-end for information entry, a database permitting searching on a number of fields, e.g., sector (e.g., virology/architecture/education), countries eligible, deadline), a front-end for information seekers and a back end tying it all together.

Because of the hackathon's time limitations and our urgent work on other COVID projects, including among other things an inexpensive ventilator, we've decided to present a proof of concept rather than a full solution. But completing a full solution will not be hard for us once colleagues who are available to assist our efforts join us, as they will be able to soon. The data entry and data retrieval front ends have straightforward and relatively simple to address technical requirements. The database will not be complicated, since the number of fields is small and the searches that will be conducted are simple. The back end is also easy to code.

The primary problem will be scaling if our tool becomes as heavily used by information seekers as we believe it should be. Also, some manual intervention will be required, since information providers will have to be vetted to ensure that they are legitimate funders.The need for manual effort will decline as more and more funders are accepted into the system and as we can deploy scraping and other automated techniques to acquire data. User support, though, will be a continuing necessity.

Security is unfortunately an issue, since many attacks have already been directed at entities involved in the fight against COVID. Our job in this area will be made easier by the fact that the information our tool will provide will not be secret. This means that hacking is likely to be much less of a problem than, say, DDOS attacks.

Our weekend's work

For our proof-of-concept demo for this hackathon we have modified a crowd-funding template to show, roughly, what our tool needs to do. It is not an MVP, and we know that there are flaws even in the demo that we have prepared. For example, the lack of a back end means that clicking on the images in the About section brings the user to the top of the site rather than to an appropriate dialog or data entry form. And the text in the search bar is very difficult to read. But we think that we've gotten the point across that a tool of the sort that we propose to code is both necessary and feasible. We are keen to, and capable of, developing a functional tool very rapidly.

What our tool brings to the anti-COVID war

"Amateurs talk strategy and tactics; professionals logistics" or so the battle-tested aphorism goes. And our tool is a digital logistical weapon in the anti-COVID fight. Like bar codes on containers containing war materials and the bar code readers that use them to direct cargoes to the right destinations, our tool ensures that the immaterial ammunition of funding gets into the hands of the front-line intellectual and production warfighters who can best use it. Put more prosaically, our tool makes sure that the people and institutions who can contribute to the anti-COVID fight know what funding is available to them and what they need to do to get it, greatly increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of funders' efforts to finance that fight.

What's our post-hackathon battle plan and what munitions do we need?

Our post-hackathon requirements are relatively minimal. We can recruit colleagues to work with us to create an MVP which we will roll out on a limited basis and, using agile development techniques, rapidly improve and augment. We have researched what information seekers need from funders in the way of data (e.g., limitations as to eligible countries, application deadlines, question deadlines), and a member of our team is highly familiar with both governmental, supra-governmental and IFI calls as well as private fundraising efforts. So we have both the developer and user advocate roles dealt with.

Funding is an issue as is the time that our prior commitment to our ventilator project requires. But with the exposure and validation that participating in the hackathon, with the progress that we have already made (by no means all of it visible in our demo site) and with the assistance of colleagues we have worked with in the past, we can complete our project fast. Deployment remains an issue, since renting the necessary servers could involve significant expense, but we think that the merit of our project is evident and that funding will be available for it if we receive some sort of recognition . In any event, we will begin to seek such funding as soon as the hackathon ends. And of course we would be pleased to work closely with those implementing the EIC COVID platform.

What value do we have once the war is over?

In a sense, it doesn't matter. Our tool is inexpensive to build, and if it is never used afterward it's value in fighting COVID will have justified its cost many times over.

But we don't have to demobilize completely once COVID is defeated. There are many cross-border, cross-discipline problems where, like with the COVID fight, funders and experts have difficulty finding one another. This is obviously less of a problem for narrowly focused problems, e.g., genetic sequencing of a particular organism or disease prevention in a single country, but there are many, more complicated problems against which our tool could and should be deployed.