COVID Project idea: Transcription, translation, content reformatting, and summarization

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