In solidarity with the Black community and with respect for and in light of the murders of countless African-Americans including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Sean Reed, and Ahmaud Arbery, Nation of Makers and Make: Community are participating in The Show Must Be Paused on Tuesday, June 2, 2020 as a part of #BlackoutTuesday.
As such, we are pausing our weekly Plan C: Live Show, and asking instead, that our communities pause to consider how our individual and collective actions as a diverse maker community (including the work we have been doing to make and supply personal protective equipment) can continue to empower, support, and make a positive difference in Black communities and in the lives of Black Americans. Our scheduled June 2 show will be aired instead on June 9, 2020.
This week’s Plan C Live program features the several organizers of sites that provide connections between those in need of PPE and those who can produce it. Dr. Megan Ranney is a practicing emergency room physician who helped to start GetUsPPE.org. Albert Wong is the CTO of FindtheMasks.com and Linda Yang joined this volunteer effort to help internationalize the service as well as launch a parallel site, findthemakers.com.
Join co-hosts Dorothy Jones-Davis of Nation of Makers and Dale Dougherty of Make: Community.
The Panel
- Megan Ranney MD, co-Founder, GetUsPPE
- Shuhan He MD, co-Founder, GetUsPPE
- Albert Wong, Chief Technology Officer, Find the Masks
- Linda Wang, Project Lead, Find the Masks
On this program, we will learn about these organizations and how they came into being so rapidly to address the need for PPE and find alternative means of producing them. Dr. Ranney provide the perspective of what is happening from inside the healthcare system, and how groups can be most effective in meeting their needs. Both groups are matching consumers and producers and we can talk about how that is working. Both are examples of volunteer, civic response efforts.
GetUsPPE
GetUsPPE.org is dedicated to matching donors to health systems in need of protective equipment. It helps makers and others contribute by making PPE and connect them to communities and healthcare systems that are willing to accept donations of PPE.
Megan Ranney MD is a founding partner of GetUsPPE.org and a practicing emergency physician and researcher, focusing on the intersection between digital health, violence prevention, and public health. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital/Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She is the Director and founder of the Brown Emergency Digital Health Innovation (EDHI) program (www.brownedhi.org).
FindtheMasks.com and FindtheMakers.com
FindtheMasks.com was started in March 2020 by Rachel Popkin, a senior product manager for Google in Seattle, WA. The site is an interactive mapping tool and directory that provides listings and locations for those in need of PPE as well as those who are able to produce PPE. Findthemasks.com is an all-volunteer effort of people with widely different skill sets. FindtheMakers is a related effort to provide a listing of makers available to produce PPE. Through partnerships with Nation of Makers & OSMS, Find the Makers now connects maker and sewist groups in 44 countries around the world.
Albert Wong is the Chief Technical Officer of FindtheMasks.com. He works at Google in Seattle as a Staff Engineer on the Chrome Security team. He was an Engineer and Founding Member of U.S. Digital Service.
Linda Yang joined Find the Masks to internationalize the interactive PPE needs mapping tool now available in 12 countries and accessible in 8 languages. As a maker herself who leads a 3D print group in Canada making PPE during the pandemic, she saw the utility and need for a parallel map of makers was evident. Linda Yang is a Scientific Manager & Bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD.
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