Congratulations to all the teams! We had a nice ceremony last night and chatted with everybody about what steps they’re planning next with their projects. Congratulations to the 6 prize winners - which you can discover on the Official Results page - and congratulations to all 23 finalists of the hackathon! 
A number of organizations and communities have offered grants and coaching to all the teams. We have a form here in case you would like to add any other accelerators, funding programs, or other ideas to sustain and accelerate the projects at https://togethervsvirus.ca/next-steps
It was a really special chance to both extend the VersusVirus concept and platforms overseas, and to reconnect with Canada after many years abroad. My heartfelt thanks go to the entire organizing team and to each and every one of our participants for the challenge and wonderful experience!
At this point I want to personally recognize the teams that did particularly interesting things with data:
Team Postal Greenhouse used a data integration platform to do some serious data wrangling: geocoding a set of online spreadsheets collecting data across Canadian provinces, exporting this in the form of a database in an open standard (OGC GeoPackage) to build an app that takes user inputs from the web form, reads from the geopackage and generates web maps. Their project parallels our work in Switzerland from a few years back in the Open Food Data program, and I wish them well as they explore partnerships for an urban farm ecosystem and launch their project.
In Identifying supply delivery needs, the project team decided to tackle the issue of resource allocation and duplication for work across organisations working, by aggregating information about existing initiatives (NGOs, citizen groups, government), standardising the data collection, providing transparency regarding proper allocation of contributions to increase trust.
The Strong Virtual Worker team did some excellent user research and market analysis, mind-mapping and designing a solution to a very immediate problem for many people in the lockdown. They went through a lot of statistics about isolation, collecting insights that we hope will be useful to them in implementing their design in the next stage. As member of a coworking community where we talk about this a lot, I know that I will be able to at least put their mindmaps to good use.
Team Ethical Tracing did not manage to submit their project in time, but started a meaningful discussion and collected research around the privacy issues of contact tracing apps and other digital public health interventions. We hope that they will stay in touch with each other, find a way to stay on track and publish results soon.
In other news 
Canada just announced a country wide immunity task force:
Back over to you, Switzerland 
Canada, where a fork of the event is being run this weekend.
