#Data4COVID19 Round-Up: 30 July
By: Andrew J. Zahuranec
Tags: Covid 19, Data4covid19, Data, Data Stewardship, Data Collaborative

Welcome to The GovLab’s #Data4COVID19 Round-Up. This temporary, weekly curation will provide you with notable updates to the #Data4COVID19 data collaborative repository and other information meant to facilitate data stewardship in the ongoing pandemic. If you received this email from a colleague, you can subscribe here.

PHOTO: Unsplash/Nicolas Weldingh is licensed under CC0

Summer of Open Data Series

The GovLab, through the Open Data Policy Lab, has published the first two blogs and videos of its Summer of Open Data, three-month project conducted in partnership with the Open Data Institute, the Open Data Charter, BrightHive, and the Digital Trade & Data Governance Hub to jump start an exploration into the third wave of open data that addresses data gaps and is fueled by enhanced data collaboration.



The first panel features the project’s co-sponsors: Matt Gee (BrightHive), Ania Calderon (Open Data Charter), and Jeni Tennison (Open Data Institute). The second panel includes Paul Ko (LinkedIn), Justine Hastings (RIPL and Brown University), and Denise Linn Riedl (City of South Bend, Indiana). In both, participants discuss the key contours, opportunities and challenges of the Third Wave of Open Data.



You can read more about the series here. Videos and blogs will be posted each Wednesday on the Open Data Policy Lab’s Medium site. Next week, we will publish our interview with Audrey Tang, the Taiwanese government’s digital minister.



Responsible Data Summit Panel: Data Steward & Pandemic Response

Yesterday, the Responsible Data Summit broadcast a panel moderated by The GovLab’s Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer Stefaan Verhulst. With Richard Benjamins (Telefonica), Claudia Juech (Cloudera), and Brennan Lake (Cuebiq), Stefaan led a discussion on the value of data collaboration and data stewards in crisis events. The speakers looked specifically at how these assets could contribute to COVID-19 response and recovery effort and the emerging practices in pandemic response.



You can find a full video of the conversation here.



What’s New in the #Data4COVID19 Repository

The #Data4COVID19 repository added seven more entries this week, expanding to 333 in total. Projects now span:

East Asia and Pacific: 16 (+0)

Europe and Central Asia: 65 (+2)

Latin America and the Caribbean: 13 (+0)

Middle East and North Africa: 1 (+0)

North America: 72 (+2)

South Asia: 3 (+0)

Sub-Saharan Africa: 16 (+1)

Global: 105 (+3)

There remain 27 data challenges and 15 requests for data.



Each week, we will highlight a few of those recent additions to the repository that you might have missed. These examples illustrate innovative methods, appear demand-driven, or otherwise demonstrate an attempt to translate insights into action. We also aspire, to the extent possible, to make the selections geographically diverse. A project’s inclusion does not indicate endorsement by The GovLab or confirmation of its success in meeting its goals.



This week’s entries center on efforts to better inform government decision-making. The three below projects use interesting sources, such as satellite data or private-sector data, to help high-ranking decision makers better respond to the crisis.



NYC Recovery Data Partnership: The NYC Recovery Data Partnership is a data collaborative between the City of New York and community, nonprofit, and private organizations on COVID-19 response and recovery. Partner organizations provide data to improve local understanding of how New Yorkers have been affected by COVID-19. This information, in turn, can be requested by city agencies. Use cases are evaluated by partnership staff with input from external advisors who seek to ensure privacy, fairness, accountability, and transparency of data usage.



Sierra Leone National COVID-19 Emergency Operations Centre Geospatial Analysis: Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Government of Sierra Leone has activated a National COVID-19 Emergency Operations Centre, comprised of various government bodies, to work with international parties — such as GRID3; Esri; Maxar Technologies; Fraym; Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data; and UN Economic Commission for Africa — on pandemic response. The organizations use geospatial datasets under an open, non-commercial license to produce analyses and tools that support official COVID-19 response. The geospatial data helps clarify various risk factors for COVID-19 infection as well as socio-economic vulnerability to shocks that the pandemic might cause.



CoronaNet Research Project: The CoronaNet Research Project is an initiative spearheaded by researchers at NYU Abu Dhabi, Hochschule für Politik at the TU Munich, and Yale University to compile data on government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The initial hand-coded dataset — assembled in cooperation with 500 political, social, and public health scholars from around the world — provides information on 15,000 separate policy announcements from governments beginning in 31 December. These actions are coded to indicate the level of government responding (e.g. national, regional, or local), the specific actions taken (e.g. travel bans, investments), geographic areas targeted, population or object targeted, compliance mechanism, and timing.





You can also find additional resources related to data stewardship and data collaboration here.