In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, colleagues from the European Commission’s Directorate for Informatics and several other services along with the Joinup, NIFO, and OSOR teams have joined forces to release a repository of digital solutions and initiatives that help public administrations, businesses, and citizens fight back against the coronavirus.

The outbreak and extremely fast spread of COVID-19 is affecting everybody’s life and has brought about enormous challenges for the public and private sectors. The pandemic is disrupting public administrations, businesses, universities, and schools. It has overwhelmed health services around the globe. It has shaken our communities to the core. We have to work together to overcome the challenges we are facing these days.

In times of emergency and in the era of widely used confinement measures and social distancing, digital technology is undeniably an essential part of crisis response. This is why we have opened a new collection on the Joinup collaborative platform: Digital Response to COVID-19. It is a repository of digital solutions and initiatives that aid us in stopping the pandemic, mitigate its effects, or help us work and study at this difficult time.  

To support the efforts of organisations and people working hard to contain the spread of the coronavirus and to bring our lives back to normal, we have started to post information on open source solutions, open data sets, hackathons and events as well as various initiatives and resources that cover a wide spectrum of COVID-19-related issues. They range from public health, education, e-events, and volunteering to collaborative opportunities, among others. The repository can be used to experiment, to build the apps, data tools, and the information means to collectively fight the pandemic.

This is an ongoing project, and we will update the repository on a regular basis. We invite you to contribute. We invite you to post your stories, share your work and experience. We can learn from each other’s efforts. Together we can kick the virus and hack the crisis! Join us.

If you are aware of any ongoing initiatives related to digital responses to COVID-19, please let us know here or drop us an email at ISA2@ec.europa.eu.