A thing which has been surprisingly useful many times in the last month:

There are a lot of people who are time-constrained right now and who operate on e.g. text quickly. Some information they need is audio or video.

You would think "Ahh just get it transcribed; brilliant."
However, many of these people are in organizations which do not have a convenient way to quickly get something transcribed. It requires a roundtrip through vendor qualification, a purchase order, possibly public notification requirements, etc etc.
Thus you can get a *surprising* amount of leverage if you have independent grantmaking authority i.e. a credit card.

"Here's a transcription of X prepared by a commercial transcription agency I am unaffiliated with."

Same for translations/etc.

That was Patrick McKenzie on twitter.

You could extend it slightly:

"The COVID Knowledge Project"

Functions:

  • Professional transcriptions (well formatted, table of contents, etc) of COVID video and audio content
  • High quality translation of COVID content, papers, etc between languages
  • Content reformatting - basically take thoughtful proposals and information shared on twitter, and repackage it in a way that is easier for people not on twitter to read, share and discover. Twitter content isn't very legible outside of twitter. But turn it into a blog post with clean typography and add a summary and a table of contents and it becomes much better.
  • Content summarization - high quality summaries of covid related content that could be potentially important

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For a concrete example of this, the Heinsberg study Wikipedia page is only available in German (and the English translation is a stub), even though it would be of broad interest to English audiences as well.

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