Many social welfare organizations played an important role during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, some of which had volunteers dedicated to collecting and sharing related information online and providing public welfare service in the form of social innovation. Open source community (community with open source code) culture is an unique product of the information age and its core value elements include shared social responsibility, community spirit of dedication and sharing, and collaborative innovation. Therefore, the open source community can exert its unique potential and impact in responding to a public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the Yang Foundation??s theoretical framework of social innovation and with “Wuhan 2020” open source community as an example, the online self-organizing process, weakly centralized distributed collaboration mode and relevant tools of the community are studied and analyzed. This community is an online open source community made up of nearly 4000 volunteers, which has completed the design, development and operation of a public welfare service product in a short time in the form of cross-regional collaborative innovation. This practice expands the boundaries of social innovation, and shows how community members, after being united based on common value and goals, have achieved to build a framework of distributed decision making and collaboration through self-organization, so as to carry out collaborative innovation and quickly offer services to the public.