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Comment by tilolebo | Hacker News Reader

  I have a kindergartener and left my job at the end of March to volunteer on COVID efforts.

Thank you so much for this! Teachers and educators really have a hard time these days.

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Well, I'm not a teacher (I lead a USDR team), but they really do. When restrictions started, my wife and I set up twice-daily Zooms for our son's class while the schools figured out what to do. It was exhausting, but eventually our kid's teacher started joining them and now has taken them over. She also conducts a dozen "small group" sessions throughout the week, and juggles the wildness and lack of attention of kindergarteners with the responsibility of raising her own newborn.

It's cray for everyone, just in different shapes and sizes.

What is USDR?

USDR is the U.S. Digital Response[0] – a band of volunteers (over 5000 folks have volunteered, maybe a few hundred are active), mostly technologists, who are working pro-bono on behalf of state, city, county, and local governments across the US to help improve COVID response and recovery efforts.

My team is a couple dozen folks who typically dive into issues relating to internal challenges governments have wrangling their data into shape so they can make decisions. We've worked with NYC on their PPE crisis, Pennsylvania on hospital capacity tracking, Oakland on homeless encampments, and several others. Sometimes it's a quick python script to automate data ingestion, other times it's a complete web app.

In our case, most of it is private/internal, so it's not sexy work, but it really feels like we're having an impact.

[0]: https://www.usdigitalresponse.org/

Nice!

This led me to search for and apply to the German equivalence:

https://digital-response.de/

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