This is an ideation challenge for social good. No prize money is available. Each member in the top 10 placement will be awarded an exclusive Topcoder T-shirt.
However, we will be rewarding those with the best ideas and developers who helped build with prize money during the development phase.
Coronavirus (Covid-19), the pandemic that is happening right now, has been spread all around the world. As of this challenge launch, there are now more than 160,000 cases in 157 countries, and more than 6,000 people have lost their lives (Data source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/), and these numbers are increasing everyday. These are not just numbers, there are people, family, and lives behind each number. Various aspects have been affected by coronavirus: schools are closed, gatherings are banned, some cities are locked down, even shelves of the supermarkets are emptied due to panic shopping. Coronavirus is deeply changing how we all live our daily lives.
Topcoder, the world's largest Open Innovation Community, would like to engage our great digital talents (yes, it is you!) to do something for social good. We would like to build an app, a website, or any other digital application to help people at a certain point during this hard time.
Hence, we have launched the Topcoder Anti-Coronavirus Hackathon series, from ideation to implementation, to turn your great ideas to the real application. The application will be open-sourced and you will be one of the contributors. Our talented Topcoder members, let’s come together and contribute something for the social good!
This is the first challenge of this series. In this challenge, we are looking for your great ideas to help people, government or any organizations during the time of Coronavirus spreading.
Here are some ideas and thoughts for your reference:
1. Help the government to identify and track the people who contacted infected people or visited high-risk cities in the last 14 days. China has built a colored QR code system for it, which has been proven effective. Here is a news reference.
2. Provide information on where to buy medical supplies like facial masks, medical alcohols, etc. Your application might need to monitor and scrape all online stores, check and update once medical suppliers are available.
3. Build a mobile app to notify about nearby cases. Mark the cases nearby the users and warn them not to go or pass through there.
4. Build an online medical consultation platform, you can get advice from Doctor volunteers online, in case you have symptoms.
5. How could we bring all nations and governments together to fight against the new virus? Is there a way of sharing supplies, tests, knowledge in a way that would lower the damage this new enemy causes?
6. Share ideas about how education could go on, from cities of developed countries to 3rd world rural areas? Also, how to help parents to keep their kids busy, while they might also just be learning how to work from home?
7. Propose solutions to help the general public to cope with the new, uncertain situation and maintain mental health as per the WHO suggestions. Consider the adjustment reactions to the crisis discussed here.
8. How to raise awareness and inform people about the situation without causing panic?
Please note these ideas above are just for your reference, you are more than welcome to propose your own ideas to help people, organization or government at any point. Also, you are welcome to consolidate any of our ideas and make it feasible.
You need to write a document (in MS Word, Markdown or PDF) following this format:
Title: Title of your idea
Description: The high-level overview/statement of your idea
Details:
Description of background and problem that your idea is going to solve.
Description of how your idea works to solve this problem.
UI Design of your idea (i.e. paper prototypes (rough drawings of an interface), screen design)
Advantages of your idea.
Key scenarios:
In which scenarios, it will help people at which point?
Potential difficulties:
What are the potential difficulties? Like how to get enough data? How to get enough users etc?
Pitch:
If you were to present your idea - how might you present or "pitch it" so the audience/reviewers/judges would understand your idea?
Appendix (optional)
The document should be a maximum of 8 pages (3-5 pages are recommended) in Microsoft Word, Markdown or PDF format. It should be written in English. Using charts, diagrams and tables to explain your ideas are encouraged from a comprehensive perspective.
No code is required. But you are also encouraged to accompany your ideas with code snippets, links or anything else that may help us understand your ideas.
Technology stack
Up to you, no limitations
Referenced dataset
Here is Global Coronavirus Dataset, which might be a benefit to your ideas/applications https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-rmk3gahdzo3tg
The copilot/Topcoder admins will review your submission using the ideation scorecard.
There will be no appeals/appeals response phase and the copilot/Topcoder admin’s decision will be final.
Your submission will be scored based on:
Effectiveness of your solution (50%)
How much benefit it can provide to users for anti-coronavirus.
How strong it is needed. It would be better if you can provide something “must” rather than “nice to have”.
Feasibility of your solution (30%)
How well you explained your solution, we don’t want a list of bullet-points. (20%)
Submit a zip archive that includes
A document that follows the requirement above.
Any other compliment materials, like images, references, etc. (Optional)
Topcoder will compensate members in accordance with our standard payment policies, unless otherwise specified in this challenge. For information on payment policies, setting up your profile to receive payments, and general payment questions, please refer to https://help.topcoder.com/hc/en-us/articles/217482038-Payment-Policies-and-Instructions
For challenges that have a reliability bonus, the bonus depends on the reliability rating at the moment of registration for that project. A participant with no previous projects is considered to have no reliability rating, and therefore gets no bonus. Reliability bonus does not apply to Digital Run winnings. Since reliability rating is based on the past 15 projects, it can only have 15 discrete values.
