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Helpful Engineering is a nonprofit incubator made up of an open community of volunteers without a commercial purpose created to design, source and execute projects that can help people suffering from the COVID-19 crisis worldwide. They apply unused engineering and manufacturing resources to help address the COVID-19 pandemic.
Helpful Engineering has partnered with doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals, to know what would help them the most in this crisis, quickly trying to design and arrange the production of pragmatic devices to move life-saving air, extend existing tools, or organize volunteers on the ground to bolster medical workers.
The organization started from a single Google Drive folder, a couple of Slack channels and a JOGL page. On the first day, 10 members joined. Three days after, a Reddit post brought in over 100 people, and on the next day a few hundred. By the 5th day, after a Helpful Engineer volunteer appeared on Portuguese national television, over 2000 volunteers joined the community.
As of the 19th of March, over 11 000 members have joined the discussion on Slack and over 3 000 skilled professionals from all over the world registered to volunteer with their time, tools, expertise, and even offer their factories and materials.
