Sorry, I didn't catch where your volunteer shifts are happening?
In the very first sentence you shame commentators for presuming to be more competent than hospital staff, then you go on to suggest riding in on a silver steed to bless them with your powerful expertise.
Frankly, a bunch of startup hackers showing up and trying to play hero is not going to be any more effective than this blog post. This doesn't get solved with arrogant cowboy antics, and it doesn't get solved in a week even by seasoned experts. You have no knowledge of the ecosystem of devices operating on their network, and the constellation of concerns they must balance, and thus you can't offer anything but the most general of advice with which their IT staff is certainly already familiar.
If you really want to make a difference, go apply for a job there and put in a few years of work—that is likely to have impact. Short of that, there's worse things you can do than write a blog post; at least a few of them are probably providing useful perspectives to those actually tasked with solving this problem long-term.
My shifts are happening in two elementary schools, three urgent care clinics, and a local nonprofit's office. Why did you think I was speaking hypothetically? I've already taken the next two weeks off. When I'm done with this batch I've got more to do.
Your entire second paragraph is bullshit. The affected are being affected because their existing technology deployments are broken. This isn't just some nightmare that happens to everyone, and it isn't some abstract structural issue that only affects large organizations. There are a lot of groups getting screwed here. They need help. If they didn't need help, they wouldn't have got hit. I am helping.
You can sit by and armchair-quarterback the incident response, that's fine. We don't need you anyway. Useful perspectives can go pound sand. There is work to be done.
The OP is talking about big orgs, so it's kind of a dick move to hijack the conversation and proclaim your agenda to be morally superior. You don't have to put other people down to make your point. It's childish, counter-productive, and you leave yourself open to criticism that your work is also The Wrong Thing because you're not volunteering for some greater cause like helping sick and dying people in developing nations. But I guess if a desire to be better than everyone else motivates you to do some good then I guess it's not a total loss?
In the very first sentence you shame commentators for presuming to be more competent than hospital staff, then you go on to suggest riding in on a silver steed to bless them with your powerful expertise.
Frankly, a bunch of startup hackers showing up and trying to play hero is not going to be any more effective than this blog post. This doesn't get solved with arrogant cowboy antics, and it doesn't get solved in a week even by seasoned experts. You have no knowledge of the ecosystem of devices operating on their network, and the constellation of concerns they must balance, and thus you can't offer anything but the most general of advice with which their IT staff is certainly already familiar.
If you really want to make a difference, go apply for a job there and put in a few years of work—that is likely to have impact. Short of that, there's worse things you can do than write a blog post; at least a few of them are probably providing useful perspectives to those actually tasked with solving this problem long-term.