O is for Team OSV — Andy Henry Studio A-Z

During the lockdowns of March 2020, Ireland-based ‘Open Source Ventilator’, a voluntary collective of engineers, designers and makers merged with international teams to form a global tech response to the pandemic.

Originally organised around the idea of an emergency field-use ventilator, this group of talented volunteers went on to develop all kinds of prototypes for front line use.

Working closely with the communications team on lockdown Zoom calls, I was only too happy to help the team reposition the offering to include:

(1) A range of solutions – not just an Open Source Ventilator, and (2) represent the efforts of the international group of volunteers.

The system we created adapted the existing ‘OSV’ moniker, adding ‘Team’ and reassigning the acronym to ‘Open Source Volunteers’.

The ingenious use of the Nato phonetic alphabet (thanks Noel Toolan) gave us an easily identifiable naming convention for the solutions.

TeamOSV now stands at over 3,000 volunteers working on over 40 open-source solutions related to COVID-19.

It was an honour to contribute in a small way to this ambitious and inspiring project.

Find out more at TeamOSV.com