Ask HN: Engineering group to fight Covid-19 needs fee waiver from Slack

[charleshe]

Hi,

We're organizing an engineering group to devise solutions to help against COVID-19.

We currently have 390+ people in our Slack. This includes ex-FANG, software developers and mechanical engineers. We also have PhDs, medical doctors, nurses and other clinicians.

The growth of our group was (is) extremely rapid. I expect to be quickly approaching Slack's horizon of 10,000 messages via the free plan.

Cutting off our messages will deprive us of important past insights and discussions. This will hamper our activities significantly.

Paying the standard plan's fee seems punitive in this situation. Indeed, even the non-profit rate implies monthly fees of $1,125 if we reach 500 members (we added hundreds today).

We are literally working to find ways to help frontline medical staff, who we are worried might be overwhelmed by COVID-19.

Given the time constraints, we are concentrated on products, not on funding.

Under the unique circumstances, can someone reach out to Slack corporate to ask for an exemption?

Our group is: helpfulengineering.slack.com

[sethammons]

If you have hundreds of members, why not ask each for a couple of dollars to cover slack costs? Or use a different platform. Or self host something else. Not to be overly dismissive, but my first impression is that you have a bunch of devs finding something interesting and wanting to follow along rather than a key cohort of people who will "disrupt covid-19." I don't see why Slack should pay for a bunch of people to use their platform. They are in the business of making money, and offer reduced costs for non-profits. If that doesn't work for you, use something else.

What is wrong with a subreddit for this, for example. Or a mailing list. Or just self host a chat app.

[charleshe]

Hi,

I'm interested in responding to your comment.

>Not to be overly dismissive, but my first impression is that you have a bunch of devs finding something interesting and wanting to follow along rather than a key cohort of people who will "disrupt covid-19."

The group was founded with the intention of coordinating mechanical engineers and medical clinicians to build physical devices.

For the developers and engineers coming in, most state they have considerable mechanical or device background. It's possible that the value of some of these people is low. I don’t think so. I'm not willing to have to pay the admin costs and externalities of gatekeeping access right now.

To be clear, I think we're conscious of the challenges and ways we can fail. In actively figuring out designs or devices to build, we're trying to organize hundreds of disparate people. One of our admins seemed to just have pulled a 24 hour day, and most of us have regular jobs. I think there's an underlying assumption that we only have a short period of time. We may fail but we want to give the best effort we can.

I agree with your premise, that engineering help alone is insufficient. We have a dozen doctors who trickled in but a major deficit is medical clinicians with organized opinion to advise us. These people may become fewer and less available in the weeks to come.

NOTE Please contact us (email in profile) if you are a clinician who has insights in what is needed in a situation where there is a vast surplus of patients in respiratory distress, or other ways we can help (e.g. we have heard requests for PPE needs from clinicians). Note that one reason we need multiple opinions is because of the different cultures and organizations that might exist in emergency environments.

>If you have hundreds of members, why not ask each for a couple of dollars to cover slack costs?

I’m not uncomfortable raising money, but right now, the organizational demands are extreme. I'm unwilling to add to this by having some sort of finance committee and managing the ethics and optics of raising money.

Also, narrative is important and raising say, X dollars for operations could affect efforts to raise 100X dollars to actually build medical devices to alleviate suffering or reduce the burden on clinicians.

>I don't see why Slack should pay for a bunch of people to use their platform. They are in the business of making money, and offer reduced costs for non-profits. If that doesn't work for you, use something else.

There's significant costs Slack incurs to engineer and build its services. We're grateful for this.

However, the marginal cost to slack from our existence and activities seems to be about the same as this discussion is to HN.

> Or use a different platform. Or self host something else.

I'm not sure there's a lock in effect, but given our presumption of urgency, we couldn't migrate without losing many hours of everyone's time, admin resources, etc. The culture here among engineers seems to prefer Slack and I expect there would be abundant residual effects from a change.

Charles He

[true_religion]

Asking each member to PayPal 2 dollars to keep this going will be a great test of who, if anyone, is actually committed to the project and let you cut out dozens of people whose only contribution would be bike shedding.

[charleshe]

Hi all, it appears that Slack has upgraded our plan so we are not faced with the 10,000 message horizon issue.

We're extremely grateful to Slack for the rapid response.

I would edit the post but I cannot any longer.

[g10r]

Did they adjust based on this HN post? We are wanting to get the My Climate Journey Slack account (550+ people) upgraded as well...

[charleshe]

To be clear, we got a trial period, and this was warmly given.

(I don't want to misrepresent what happened.)

[redis_mlc]

In most disaster scenarios, programmers are not welcome because they're dead weight.

Unless, of course, they can write a fat check.

So if you want to actually help, donate money.

[free-messenger]

You could use free Chat with Jabber(XMPP).

There is a public english chat room for COVID-19: xmpp:[e-mail]?join

A public german COVID-19 chat you find here: xmpp:[e-mail]?join

Or feel free open a new chat room on a server you like or at your own server if you want to.

More informations (german): www.freie-messenger.de/sys_xmpp

[rspain]

Hi all,

Can we get more eyes on this.

We're working on open-source projects that can help reduce Corona virus infection and design high tech solutions to help ICU doctors and nurses dealing with CoVID19 patients.

If you are a tech with medical knowledge then we need you. If you are a tech with respiratory knowledge you'll be a valuable member. Please join!

Maybe we should tag this with "Show HN:" it may get more traction?

[Jugurtha]

Maybe I don't understand the pricing correctly, but I think you're not "limited" to 10,000 messages. The limit is on history and searching through messages, in which the 10,000 limit kicks in. I think you can send as many messages as you want.

We've been using Slack for years and are way past 10,000 messages. You just can't search messages dating back many years. Although we can get the files we sent many years ago.

[mratsim]

They don't want to lose "old" insights if the growth of the group makes it that over 10k messages are sent in a short time (say 2 weeks).

[DarthGhandi]

have you considered using any of the numerous free open source alternatives to slack?

[muzani]

I wonder why Slack hasn't at least done discount rates for large memberships, or a cheap version that just gives chat access. It supports a big group very well, but a group of curious strangers meeting online is going to be obscenely expensive.

[Runamok81]

Any thoughts on https://opencollective.com/ ?

[jklein11]

I work in Healthcare IT and am interested in joining. Any reason we can’t migrate to zulip or mastodon?

[charleshe]

Please email me, in my profile.

Short answer: there's sort of a lock-in effect and we really have other needs right now.

[duxup]

What ways are they possibly helping?

Not to doubt the venture but at this stage I'm not sure what can be done.

[probinso]

You didn't have to use slack

[whb07]

Discord, Zullip(spelling?) and others can provide the functionality you want for free.

[ayoubElk]

How do I go about requesting an invite?

[charleshe]

Please email me, in my profile.