Mozilla picks recipients for its COVID-19 Solutions Fund

Mozilla has announced that it has picked the final three recipients for its COVID-19 Solution Fund that was announced several months ago. Each of the recipients has been awarded up to $50,000 based on their needs and each of the projects is open source so they can be replicated around the world.

The first recipient is OpenMRS, a “robust, scalable, user-driven, open source electronic medical record system”. OpenMRS is currently used in 64 countries to manage more than 12 million patient at over 5,000 health facilities. The package will eventually become the OpenMRS Public Health Response distribution that will contain science-based data collection tools, reports, and data exchange interfaces, all of which will be helpful for tackling future disease outbreaks. It received an award of $49,754.

The second recipient is the Open Food Network. This project is described as a virtual farmers’ market and creates a resilient local food economy. The Open Food Network allows food producers to sell directly to consumers, and wholesalers can manage buying groups and sell their goods through food hubs and shops. The Open Food Network currently operates in India, Brazil, Italy, South Africa, Australia, the UK, the U.S., and five other countries. With its $45,210 award, it will expand to ten more countries.

The final project is called Careables Casa Criatura Olinda. It operates in northeast Brazil and produces face shields for local hospitals based on an open source design. With its $25,000 award (they may get an additional $5,000), it plans to increase the production of face shields and start producing aerosol boxes using an open source design. Aerosol boxes allow hospitals to prevent the spread of the virus from patient to patient and patient to physician. In Recife, Brazil (population: 1.56 million), there are reportedly only three aerosol boxes, with the funding, the organisation could help to increase this number.

At the start of May, Mozilla funded the first three recipients: VentMon, which works on and tests open source emergency ventilator designs; Recidiviz, a non-profit working on a modelling tool to help governments forecast the COVID-19 impact in prisons; and COVID-19 Supplies NYC, a project by 3DBrooklyn, which is producing 2,000 face shields every week for New York City.