This article comes from WeChat public account “Hedgehog Commune” (ID: ciweigongshe), author Yu Han, Ai Faner released with permission.

This is a fight against viruses, but also a battle against information. The sooner you understand the truth, the sooner you can prepare for what might happen next.

When most people stay at home with nothing to do, Assiam has lived upside down for more than half a month. Especially from the first day of the first month to the sixth day of the first month, she slept for less than five hours almost every day-falling asleep at three or four in the morning, and waking up at eight in the morning. It all started on January 24th.

Axiasan is a native of Shaanxi, majoring in public administration undergraduate, graduate readout major, and is a science popularization author. He occasionally shares some popular science related to sports theory, physical health, and gender issues on Zhihu and Douban article.

Axiasang has another identity this Spring Festival. The documents she created “2019-nCoV first-hand information / science popularization directory” It has received more than 600,000 readings. This directory index, which contains links to official content, epidemic prevention guides, rumor information, and other content, exploded on Weibo and the circle of friends on New Year’s Eve. , Douban, Zhihu and other platforms, the entire network has more than 1 million people.

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▲ Contents of the document

Apart from Assassin, many people volunteered to join various volunteer teams after the outbreak. They are all over the country and abroad, and there are people in Wuhan, who completed a cross-regional information relay through the network. These come from folk “rumor terminatorThey receive tens of thousands of news, information, rumors, and rumors every day, extract the most authoritative and useful information, and pass it to everyone who cares about the epidemic.

This is a fight against viruses, but also a battle against information. Whoever can clear the fog can see the truth and hope.

A science blogger decides what to do

When contacting Assiam, she had just walked home with her dog. Her dog, called a latte, is a 17-month-old Boston Terrier. She only became a new member of her family in January this year.

On January 22, Assiam saw a rumor on the Internet that the new coronavirus will be transmitted to dogs, which will be replicated in dogs and then transmitted to humans. Discard or kill your pet. This made her newly angry with her pet dog very angry. Such ridiculous rumors flooded major social networking sites in the early days of the outbreak.

Axiasan told the Hedgehog Commune (ID: ciweigonghse) that she usually likes to keep fit and pay attention to health. Before the epidemic broke out, she started to pay attention to the WHO release. The related guides also prepared for the response. I bought masks, disinfectants, and medicines for my family and friends. I also sent messages to friends and Douban to remind netizens.

“In fact, the whole thing is running The time difference of information”, the sooner you understand the truth of the matter, the sooner you can Be prepared for what might happen next. Recognizing this, Axiasan decided to make a systematic summary of various types of information on the Internet so that everyone can find information and understand the full picture of the epidemic.

On the thirtieth day of the new year, Asyasan worked from 10 am to 8:30 pm, and was compiling a catalog when eating New Year’s Eve. In addition to screening primary sources such as WHO, the State Council, the Health Commission, and the media, and collecting as comprehensive and accurate personal prevention and control guidelines as possible, she was also the first to notice mental health response measures and medical supplies during the epidemic. People with logistics information.

This is a slightly magical New Year’s Eve night. The mixed information of fish and dragon was mixed with the laughter of Spring Festival Gala, and everyone’s mood became extremely complicated.

On the early morning of the 25th, Axiasan’s mental and physical strength reached critical values. She saw too much negative news from unknown sources, and she saw that it was overwhelming the psychological lines of defense of people of unknown truth. She desperately sent this document to the Douban Goose group, and called on friends to repost it on Douban Radio and in the circle of friends. She hoped that this document could be seen by more people and help them distinguish between true and false.

▲ Axiasan’s post in the goose group and netizens’ responses

The next day, the first day of the new year, Asya Sang ’s mobile phone exploded.

The “detonating” mobile phones are all good news: Thanks to the positive retweets from friends, Douban neighbors, and goose group netizens, this directory file has been read more than 100,000 times in 24 hours. The media contacted her and asked about the authorized reprint of the document; Graphite Documents and Youdao Note offered to provide her with free advanced services and technical support; Huohu.com also came to the door and hoped to forward her document. The editor assisted her work.

On January 26th, Assassin invited two editor friends, and two nutshell editors in the field of psychology and medicine to form a small team of five. She is also a master’s group in publishing at her alma mater. I found 9 school girls and younger brothers who are willing to help. They specialize in the basic work of information collection and entry. Their team also has a name: the MP editing team.

As busy as Assan is also a team that was later named Simo. Simo was one of the earliest teams to begin systematically organizing epidemic situation information. On New Year’s Eve, Simo produced and released the “Index for Epidemic Needs and Civil Assistance Information”. The document includes information on supplies and demand, transportation information at home and abroad, and various types of living assistance. Supply and demand information has been read more than 240,000 times.

When the official end of volunteer work was announced on January 30, the Simo team had nearly 100 volunteers from all over the world. according toAccording to the introduction of the Simo team, they divided the requirements into different parts, and each part was edited and organized by specific volunteers. Domestic and overseas parties work in shifts 24 hours a time zone to ensure that the documents are updated 24 hours.

A2N (Anti 2019-nCov) team compiled “Focus on reliable information and rumors about new coronaviruses” is one of the earliest documents to sort out official information and rumors, with over 1.06 million reads. Subsequently, A2N increased the work of real-time epidemic situation, virus science popularization, and related literature translation.

On January 22, A2N Volunteer Group was established to curb rumors related to 2019-nCoV, and the team expanded to hundreds in just a few days. A2N volunteers are located in 34 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions of the country, and each province has established its own epidemic information summary file.

A systematic, refined, and authoritative summary of information was extremely precious and practical when the epidemic information exploded. These documents can be seen by so many people, it is the popularity and development of shared document technology.

A group of programmers decide what to do

In the Internet technology circle, discussions about the epidemic are also in full swing.

In this epidemic, X-lab Open Lab launched an open source project wuhan2020, which aims to establish an information collection platform to collect reviewed and confirmed epidemic information. The official introduction of the X-lab Open Lab shows that this is a group of “open innovation community” composed of teachers and students from East China Normal University and Tongji University. Its professional background includes computer science, data science and related interdisciplinary subjects.

On the morning of the New Year’s Day, Frank, one of the members of the Open Lab, voiced in the team’s WeChat group, hoping to establish an online platform for epidemic areas in the form of open source projects. This idea was endorsed by the entire team: finally, as a developer, can contribute to the epidemic from a technical level.

For technicians, they are more sensitive to information and data. A phenomenon observed by the team was that the data at that time was particularly scattered, the data types were different, some were supply, and some wereThe requirements are; the source structure is also different, some are text, and some are screenshots. Based on this situation, the team decided to develop a platform and tools to unify and plan all the data.

The team leader explained the original intention of the idea to Hedgehog Commune: “Why everyone posts on WeChat and Weibo for help is because of a lack of a systematic platform. strong> If there can be a public platform where all supply and demand requirements are posted on it, it can be seen by everyone, and information can be avoided.

The programmer’s main battlefield is GitHub, an open source code base and version control system with more than 9 million developer users worldwide. GitHub is their tool of choice for managing software development and code collaboration. It is understood that the team members have established a back-end database and automated procedures, data entry is completed by automated procedures, and the collection and review mechanism is completed by volunteer crowdsourcing.

▲ Source: wuhan2020

“We do not have any work to open data entry for the time being. All the entered information will go through our review first, and only the only responsible person has the right to add and modify the data.” The team leader also told Hedgehog Commune, backstage You can see the traces and sources of all historical modifications, and in case of problems, you can trace the source accurately.

According to the team leader, there are already hundreds of people who have volunteered to join the wuhan2020 project, and dozens are still active. These volunteers will call the agency office or relevant contacts to verify one by one to ensure that all information and channels are true and valid.

The addition of programmers also brings more possibilities for information dissemination, which is also good news for the volunteer team doing document summary.

Axiasang told the Hedgehog Commune that the increase in the amount of document reading slowed down after 4 or 5 days. “The continuous flow of traffic represents the sustainability of the document, and the amount of reading has not increased, which means that our later updates No one reads the content of the project, especially the folk voluntary information that has been collected and arranged by the vast majority of manpower.

Axiasan believes that this is largely because their information is an accumulation of items, not visual information. The emergence of the development team has given these items and the entire document a more meta-presentative approach, as well as more powerful propagation and long-tail effects.

Since January 27, volunteer teams such as MP, Simo, and A2N have established cooperation with wuhan2020 and E support (Hubei Material Demand Platform Development Team), using the summary files compiled by the volunteer team as the data source, and then the development team The background program is used as technical support, so that information and consulting can appear in more application scenarios.

The cooperation of volunteers is inseparable from a Wuhan technology company. When everyone was still relaying information on their own runway, it was this team at the epidemic center that brought them together.

What a Wuhan Internet company decides to do

Wuhan City, Hubei Province is the place where the epidemic is most serious.

The base of graphite documents-WuhanChuxin Technology Co., Ltd. is based here. After the outbreak, more than 80 company employees were “trapped” in Wuhan due to the closure of the city. Several Wuhan colleagues working in Beijing and Shanghai offices stayed there and did not go home for the Chinese New Year. Everyone was worried about the family, friends and colleagues, immersed in the panic and haze of the epidemic.

Soon, this haze was dispelled by everyone’s enthusiasm and busy work.

The director of graphite document market Liu Congli told Hedgehog Commune that this is the most active Spring Festival for graphite friends. After the outbreak, many friends in the group started to act. Everyone is thinking, As an Internet technology company in the epidemic area, how to do something for the epidemic situation with its own advantages.

In this special period, information has become the most critical element. It was at this time that they noticed a group of volunteer teams including MP and Simo, as well as the information documents they compiled. Coincidentally, because of the unique document sharing and online collaboration functions, almost all the team’s documents are made of graphite documents, which also surprised graphite’s friends.

▲ Volunteer science record of graphite employees in Wuhan

According to Liu Congli, among the teams supported by the epidemic, some organizations were originally customers of graphite, but individual volunteers like this were mostly users of the personal version. Graphite quickly contacted these volunteer teams and offered to open the privileges of the advanced version for them, and was willing to provide support throughout the process to help them better integrate and present their data.

Volunteer teams from all over the country who are doing different jobs have found graphite. In order to reduce duplication of information and improve work efficiency, the idea of ​​cooperation has invariably appeared in everyone’s mind.

That is, with the efforts of graphite, volunteer teams such as MP, Simo, A2N, and wuhan2020 got on line with each other. Each team has its own focus from the beginning. After establishing contact with each other and starting communication, you can maximize the avoidance of information duplication and maximize your own advantages.

Soon, a map visualization project, map-viz, was born. In addition to the most basic epidemic situation map and epidemic situation data, various hospital locations and hotel information can also be presented on this map. It also provides a map of the epidemic situation with time axis in various provinces and cities (similar to the map in Lilac Garden H5). ).

In the week of February 3 to February 9, the map-viz and wuhan2020 projects were ranked second and third on the GitHub Hot List, respectively, and were recommended by the Linux China homepage. At present, wuhan2020 already has the official website, open source agency, and App, and WeChat applets are also being developed.

On February 8th, the Lantern Festival, X-lab officially released the “wuhan2020 New Coronavirus Epidemic Information Collection Platform Community Edition”, which is a comprehensive reflection of the contributions of all teams.

▲ Platform mobile homepage

According to the team leader, the project will continue to provide support for the design of analysis and development tools related to the epidemic after the epidemic is over.The ultimate goal is to develop a set of tools. In many scenarios, especially in such large-scale emergency public events, you can use similar tools to quickly build such a system.

At the same time, the documentation of volunteer teams is getting richer. Axiasan deleted the Shaanxi information summary in the first edition, and took the “Volunteer Volunteer Information Summary” as the fourth part, including the supply information organized by the MP editing team and the demand information organized by Simo; the rumor information made by A2N became The fifth part of the document.

With the increasing shortage of domestic materials, the MP has also added information about overseas procurement and donations at the end of the document, including donation standards, Chinese and English comparison tables for medical materials, overseas suppliers and logistics. This part of the content also provides reference and support for related teams to purchase and donate overseas materials in the future.

During the process of entering overseas medical supplies information, the team saw a manufacturer write on the official website: Hello friends in China, we are out of stock for the time being, but please rest assured that we will Think of a way to transfer to China as soon as possible.

What can I do

For Assassin, January 27 is a day of war.

On this day, she worked in a number of volunteer teams such as MP editor, Simo, wuhan2020, and E support to integrate existing information and pave the way for subsequent platform development. Just coordinating and communicating in the group, she typed a total of 18,000 words, made countless phone calls, and made countless 59-second voices.

“Each team has its own organizational structure and working methods, and there are certain difficulties in coordinating.” In the process, according to the development of the epidemic, the content of the document The division of labor with the team is constantly changing. With the update of the content, the reading volume of the document has once again shown an increasing trend.

As of January 29, 2020 23:59, Simo and MP’s 73 volunteers from all over the world entered the demand letter1293 items of information, 134 items of transportation capacity supply information, 133 items of medical supplies, 44 items of protective clothing information, 899 items of other information, 95% of the information has a dedicated one-to-one manual verification by the inspection team.

Now, many volunteers have returned to their daily study and work. There is only one small team in the Simo team to count the beds and help information. The main work of the MP is also Has been completed. However, the daily rumors and the latest official news in the document are still updated. Assiam also added a new cure case to the document: “I feel that throughout the incident, no matter what the external voice looks like, there is something we all can’t forget, that is, we must give everyone hope.”

You can see more ordinary people in the civilian information battlefield.

A volunteer team translated and carried the current science popularization information, including some practical information in Wuhan, hoping to spread and help more people Wuhan / Domestic foreigners;

A Beiyou student created a site on the implementation of the new coronavirus epidemic, went through collections, identified domain names, and developed websites. Successfully launched after hours;

A group of doctors and non-profits initiated “NCP Life Support” (formerly known as: nCoV support). Experts and Xiehe and Hubei Women’s and Children’s Hospital advised to compile the “Handbook for Maternal Self-Care during Epidemic Prevention” to help pregnant women across the country to survive the epidemic …

▲ Part of the Maternity Handbook

Starting on January 21, this is the 25th day of the outbreak. The front-line medical staff is around the clock, the courier and the food delivery staff are up and running, and the generosity of companies and individuals is difficult to find. Whoever is doing their part to contribute to this war without gunpowder.

MP and Simo members do this for neither fame nor fame. The name of the MP editing team is an abbreviation of Master of Publishing, Simo is the pinyin of the graphite document (Shimo), the letter h is removed, and the person in charge of wuhan2020 is unwilling to disclose the name to the Hedgehog Commune. The A2N team is still volunteering On the front line of information gathering, and share the latest information about the epidemic on their public account daily.

Axiasan is not idle now. In addition to daily updates to the documentation and contacting the volunteer team, she also took a photo as a model to shoot a set of fitness action teaching videos and produced a set of free public welfare lessons to help everyone alleviate the long-term “home” at home. Back pain, muscle tension and other problems.

According to changes in the development of the epidemic, people’s focus on epidemic information will also change. Next, Ashasan plans to do some sort of information on the defense of the office after the resumption of work, and is ready to write a popular science article on UV antivirus. “At least before the end of February, everyone should not relax. For everyone, the task may not be very heavy. Everyone performs his or her own job, and doing what you can do is the greatest contribution to society.”

For ordinary people, stay sane. Distinguishing what is true and what is false from the endless stream of information is the winner of this information war.