#Data4COVID19 Round-Up: 17 September
By: Andrew J. Zahuranec
Tags: Data4covid19, Covid 19, Data Stewardship, Data Collaborative, Data

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. Have an interesting novel coronavirus-related project worth sharing? Send it to us at datastewards@thegovlab.org so we can consider it as an addition.

PHOTO: Unsplash/Mufid Majnun is licensed under CC0

Summer of Open Data

The Open Data Policy Lab (a collaboration between The GovLab and Microsoft) and its partners the Open Data Institute, the Open Data Charter, Digital Trade & Data Governance Hub, and BrightHive have almost completed the Summer of Open Data, a three-month project to jump start an exploration into the third wave of open data that addresses data gaps and is fueled by enhanced data collaboration.

Two weeks ago, the Open Data Policy Lab heard from Christian Troncoso (BSA | The Software Alliance), Zachary Feder (New York City), and Natalia Domagala (United Kingdom Cabinet Office) about the evolution of the open data movement and the role this movement played in the ongoing pandemic. Participants discussed the need for transparency and responsible data use, especially given the circumstances of the current crisis. The full conversation is available via video but a summary can be found here.

This week, the Open Data Policy Lab published the blog and video of its conversation with Patrick McGarry (data.world), John Wilbanks (Sage Bionetworks), Swee Leng Harris (Luminate), and Nuria Oliver (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems). In this discussion, Stefaan and the panelists talked about a variety of issues involving the pandemic, including strategies for forging cross-sector data collaboration and mechanisms for advancing responsible data reuse.

Next week’s release, led by BrightHive’s Matt Gee, will be the final entry in the series. Those who have missed previous conversations can find a full list of blogs, videos, and speakers at the schedule here.

What’s New in the #Data4COVID19 Repository

The #Data4COVID19 repository added five more entries this week, expanding to 351 in total. Projects now span:

East Asia and Pacific: 19 (+1)

Europe and Central Asia: 67 (+0)

Latin America and the Caribbean: 13 (+0)

Middle East and North Africa: 1 (+0)

North America: 77 (+2)

South Asia: 3 (+0)

Sub-Saharan Africa: 18 (+0)

Global: 110 (+1)

While there remains 15 requests for data, the repository added a new competition, expanding the number of list of data challenges and calls for proposals to 28.

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 uses of survey data to better understand the ongoing pandemic. The data collection techniques allow for the development of new research and insights that can inform decision-making.

Keio University International Surveys on COVID-19: Japan’s Keio University is conducting surveys on public attitudes and behavior amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The first of these surveys focuses on the work, lifestyle, and attitudes of workers in Japan during the pandemic. The study, conducted in July, found an 11 percent increase in teleworking, lower than many other countries. The second survey, conducted in May and released in August, examines the Japanese public’s attitudes and values during the pandemic. It finds high anxiety among people with COVID-19 related experiences and those prone to anxiety, low trust in institutions and other people among those most anxious, and great uncertainty about the direction of the economy and the national welfare system.

Satcher Health Leadership Institute Study of Racial Impact of COVID-19: Supported by Google.org, the Satcher Health Leadership Institute will collect and analyze detailed data to better understand why communities of color hve been disproportionately harmed by COVID-19. The research will build a database representing the virus’s impact by race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status while also examining the trajectory of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. In addition to providing financial support, Google will also provide a team of engineers and data scientists who will support the Satcher Health Leadership Institute on a full-time basis over the next six months. The effort is further supported by a collaboration with the CDC Foundation.

The COVID-19 Symptom Data Challenge: The Delphi Group at Carnegie Mellon University, the Joint rogram on Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland, the Duke Margolis Center for Health Policy, and Resolve to Save have launched a public competition seeking innovative uses of Facebook–Carnegie Mellon’s COVID-19 Symptom Survey data. The publicly available data, which was collected by Facebook, provides aggregated information on the prevalence of different COVID-19 symptoms in the United States and globally. Teams and individuals can apply for entry into the challenge provided they provide a description of who they are, their approach, methods, and results. Entries will be judged based on their ability to provide new insights that can be integrated into dashboards, forecasts, and other tools for decision-makers. Submissions close 29 September.

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