OutSystems: creative initiatives and remote work — fighting a virus.
Embracing a new reality
The last weeks have brought to everyone of us, a different reality than what we were used to. Due to COVID-19 outbreak, people are being asked to work from home as much as possible, and organizations reducing the number of people in the same place. How do individuals and businesses adapt to this new reality? This question is not easy to answer, but creative steps are being taken to fight the virus effects (see section 1).
OutSystems is supporting several initiatives, to fight the virus impact on our society. There have been so many updates, taking place in a short period of time, that it’s a challenge to keep up with all of this information. I’ll make a resume to consolidate most of these initiatives (see section 2).
I really wanted to do my part, by sharing with you this information and sending positive vibes, kindness and compassion. You can also contribute, see the links below. Stay safe!
1. Remote Work and Online Community
1.1. Remote Work
Most developers are now working from home, connected with their project teams through video calls, web chats or phones. This is great to have physical social distance to help fight the outbreak. But additional strategies are taking place to make staying at home more pleasant:
- Maintaining the daily schedule routine
- Achieving a balance screen-time, family-time, and personal time.
- Incentives of exercise, time to read or hear music to relax.
- Online interactions with colleagues besides work, as regular pauses like “online coffee meetings”.
- Team building with online games, stories, songs, and other challenges.
All to maintain team’s energy level high, increase positive emotions, and to contribute for the overall well-being.
1.2. Online Communities
This is a time during which we can invest in knowledge, while working or staying at home. Consider to join online meetups, follow some courses, or even apply for certifications:
- OutSystems meetups are now online, for safety and health reasons. A good initiative and anyone can join in Meetup.com website, searching by our community events.
- Courses and classes online were upgraded by OutSystems, which recently released a new Online Trainning Planner educational tool, to enable developers absorbing additional and on-time project information.
- New certifications and free exams announced, without any cost you can get old and new certifications. The first new one is the “Associate Reactive Web Certification” and second is the “Sales Associate Certification” (exclusive for partners), which are given to who completes the correspondent exams.
And remember that it’s not only about collecting knowledge, but more important about sharing it with our community.
2. Public ideas and OutSystems initiatives
2.1. Public Ideas
OutSystems is supporting an online repository of ideas, that the general public provides to respond to challenges related to care, education, or volunteering. This is a Portuguese website, that aims to find solutions to minimize this virus impacts on our society.
2.2. OutSystems Initiatives
Another program promoted by OutSystems, has a goal to turn 20 ideas into digital systems. This program aims to help ease the current global problem caused by COVID-19 outbreak. As result, some ideas are accepted and being developed:
Project #1 (announced on 17 of March)
Corona Virus Panic Controller - Project to help connecting Doctors and Nurses stranded at home because they are infected, but still operational and willing to help. This project involves the participation of Lusíadas Hospital’s Medical staff.
Project #2 (announced on 18 of March)
Manage ventilators issues across hospitals - The purpose of this system will be to allow technical staff to submit issues with ventilators (by brand and model) and have specialists indicating possible solutions.
Project #3 (announced on 19 of March)
Monitoring and contact tracking application - The goal of the application is to monitor potential cases, prioritize them and tracking how many contacts they have had and reach out to those. If they showed any symptoms they are referred to a doctor that then could assess and report back (…)
Project #4 (announced on 21 of March)
Help Portal - A portal in which people who are looking for help get linked to people who offer help. In the portal people can actively contact each other and they receive notifications when a possible match is found (…)
Project #5 (announced on 23 of March)
Portal for matching security personnel during lock-down - Focused on preparing countries facing a scenario of total lockdown. This app will connect the available security companies that are spread over the Netherlands to mobilize and secure certain areas and buildings (…)
Project #6 (announced on 24 of March)
Covid-19 public health assistance - a case/immunity/vaccin tracker to make it easy for people to submit data freely to be able to visualize possible alarming area’s that need attention (…)
Project #7 (announced on 25 of March)
Food and basic goods delivery - The idea is to provide an e-commerce platform for municipalities (Lisbon Municipality is 100% supporting this idea), which have access to commerce and volunteer associations, that will allow them to manage this crisis (…)
Project #8 (announced on 26 of March)
Corona Volunteer App - Develop a Corona Volunteer App to engage the citizen, researchers and authorities in anonymous information collection with the common goal to increase knowledge of the Corona virus and provide estimated real time overview of the spread (…)
Project #9 (announced on 27 of March)
Small villages network - To prevent population in most vulnerable groups to leave home, the initiative aims to support solidarity networks for situations of emergency (…)
Other projects available here. Good work, cheers!
(P.S. Give a clap if you found this article useful!)
