Tag: Amazon Chime

The humanities—including performing and visual arts—help us understand and interpret the world around us. With the recent pandemic, cultural institutions are challenged as attendance is slowing, funding is diminishing, and programs are being shut down. These cultural institutions must adapt to meet the challenges of this new world. Amazon and AWS have tools to help museums, performing arts centers, and other cultural organizations extend their sphere of influence and increase their engagement with patrons, to remain relevant and better engage audiences in a digital world.

As education has shifted to remote delivery, traditional mechanisms for engaging students and creating practical learning opportunities have had to adapt too. One mechanism—the hackathon—is increasingly taking place virtually. Typically, hackathons are in-person technology events where teams or individuals create solutions to a specific problem or challenge in a short timeframe, often 24 hours or a weekend. Hackathons are also social learning events where peers can connect, learn from each other, seek support from technical experts, and produce a cool (even if imperfect) solution. Cloud technology tools and resources can help virtual hackathons be as successful as traditional hackathons.

Over the past few months, one of the biggest challenges for organizations and employees alike has been the sudden transition to remote work. But we have learned that remote work works when the right technology and leadership come together. Check out some impactful stories that demonstrate how governments have gone above and beyond using the cloud to quickly adapt to this new environment and shift away from the status quo.

For community organizations, government agencies, and educational institutions seeking to support a distributed workforce, citizenry, or student body with cloud capabilities, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has developed an online virtual booth to highlight remote work, learning, and call center use cases for the public sector. Learn how to connect your remote employees, constituents, or students on AWS by playing the AWS Cloud Champion: Virtual Workplace Interactive Challenge.

In light of COVID-19, the Santa Clara Valley Science and Engineering Fair Association (SCVSEFA) was faced with the difficult decision of cancelling or postponing this year’s event to prevent the spread of the virus. A parent of a middle school student, an AWS employee, suggested that video conferencing might be used and connected the event planners with the Amazon Chime team. Within a week, the SCVSEFA and the Amazon Chime teams worked together to hold the science fair virtually.

In support of governments and educational institutions around the world, AWS is quickly deploying people and technology to enable remote learning and home working. Our services can help address our customer’s most pressing challenges during this unprecedented time, including making sure citizens are productive with remote working solutions, that students can access online learning platforms, and that communications are reliable and available for public entities at all levels of government.

As part of our response to COVID-19, AWS is providing tools to support remote learning and teaching. This includes providing customers in the most affected regions with technical support, offerings, and AWS Promotional Credit, which help cover costs while enabling organizations to quickly stand up and scale their infrastructure and tools to meet demand, to help our educational technology providers and educators around the world quickly deploy or extend learning into the home.