NASA issues agency-wide crowdsourcing call for ideas around COVID-19 response

There’s crowdsourcing a problem, and then there’s crowdsourcing a problem within NASA, where some of the smartest, most creative and resourceful problem-solvers in the world solve real-world challenges daily as part of their job. That’s why it’s uplifting to hear that NASA has issued a call to its entire workforce to come up with potential ways the agency and its resources can contribute to the ongoing effort to fight the current coronavirus pandemic.

NASA is using its crowdsourcing platform NASA @ WORK, which it uses to internally source creative solutions to persistent problems, in order to collect creative ideas about new ways to address the COVID-19 crisis and the various problems it presents. Already, NASA is engaged in a few different ways, including offering supercomputing resources for treatment research, and working on developing AI solutions that can help provide insight into key scientific investigations that are ongoing around the virus.

There is a degree of specificity in the open call NASA put to its workforce: It identified key areas where solutions are most urgently needed, working together with the White House and other government agencies involved in the response, and determined that NASA staff efforts should focus on addressing shortfalls and gaps in the availability of personal protective equipment, ventilation hardware and ways to monitor and track the coronavirus spread and transmission. That’s not to say NASA doesn’t want to hear solutions about other COVID-19 issues, just that these are the areas where they’ve identified the most current need.

To add some productive time-pressure to this endeavor, NASA is looking for submissions from staff on all the areas above to be made via NASA @ WORK by April 15. Then there’ll be a process of assessing what’s most viable, and allocating resources to make those a reality. Any products or designs that result will be made “open source for any business or country to use,” the agency says — with the caveat that this might not be strictly possible in all cases depending on the specific technologies involved.