The “Group of Eight Australia” (Go8) are a collection of Australian universities that collaborated to produce a roadmap with two possible paths for Australia to take in fighting and recovering from COVID-19. They were enabled to conduct this collaboration during this time of quarantine by use of a collaboration tool called SWARM developed by the Hunt Laboratory at the University of Melbourne as part of an R&D effort funded by the US intelligence community. The US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) program is known as Crowdsourcing Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking, and Evaluation (CREATE).
I was impressed by the straightforward nature of the roadmap executive summary and the diversity of disciplines among the participants that put this together so quickly. There are definite differences between Australia’s situation and that of the US such as much lower population density and fewer ports of entry so this roadmap probably wouldn’t work for the US. Still, it would be nice to have a non-partisan group apply an evidence-based approach with metrics in developing roadmaps for the US to recover from COVID-19.