#Data4COVID19 Round-Up: 29 October
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/Michael Walter is licensed under CC0

New Report at the Open Data Policy Lab

Today, the Open Data Policy Lab (an initiative from The GovLab with support from Microsoft) and its partners BrightHive, Open Data Institute, Open Data Charter, and Digital Trade & Data Governance Hub) released a report summarizing the findings of the Summer of Open Data initiative, a three-month project to jump start an exploration into the open data movement involving conversations with data experts in local and regional governments, national statistical agencies, international bodies, and private companies.

Titled The Third Wave of Open Data: How to Accelerate the Re-Use of Data for Public Interest Purposes While Ensuring Data Rights and Community Flourishing, the piece details the past, present, and future of the open data movement. Noting the enormity of challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic, it describes how more collaborative, responsible, and purpose-driven approaches can improve decision-making and support public well-being. The report lays out both the elements of the Third Wave of Open Data and the actions organizations need to take to harness its benefits.

The four goals of the Third Wave of Open Data

The report is available online on the Open Data Policy Lab’s updated site. Individuals can read a summary of its major findings through the Open Data Policy Lab’s blog or read the full report hosted on the site.

What’s New in the #Data4COVID19 Repository

Since March 2020, The GovLab has hosted a Living Repository of projects, with almost 300 examples of data collaboratives aimed at addressing the pandemic. Since transferring the repository to a new site, list.data4covid19.org, we’ve sought to curate and validate those entries, narrowing them to an illustrative 180. Those projects span:

East Asia and Pacific: 8

Europe and Central Asia: 29

Latin America and the Caribbean: 7

Middle East and North Africa: 1

North America: 54 (+2)

South Asia: 3

Sub-Saharan Africa: 12

Global: 74 (+3)

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.

Two of this week’s entries seek to improve research on COVID-19 by compiling disparate datasets for researchers. The third seeks to improve awareness of COVID-19’s impact on the physical environment in which people live and work.

National COVID Cohort Collaborative Data Enclave: The National COVID Cohort Collaborative is a partnership led by the National Institutes of Health to piece together disparate health datasets to enable better collaborative research and analysis of COVID-19. Bringing together government agencies, universities, research labs, and other organizations, the effort collects and harmonizes electronic health records into a common data model and provides a way for select partners to easily access this clinical data to inform their research. The participants hope the effort can identify effective interventions for short-term response and establish a resource for long-term research to study the long-term health consequences of COVID-19.

COVID CORPUS: The COVID-19 Collaborative Research Portal and Knowledge Utility System (COVID CORPUS) is a collaborative effort by researchers to compile their activity on COVID-19 around the world to reduce the possibility of duplication. The organizers maintain an open-access database of COVID-19 related research that spans topics such as biomedicine, lifesciences, engineering, physical sciences, sociology, economics, and behavioral and cultural issues. This database can be searched to help funders and researchers understand which topics are currently being studied.

Cities and Memory #StayHomeSounds: Cities and Memory, a collaborative field-recording sound project, is collecting sound recordings to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected soundscapes around the world. Individuals can submit sounds and stories from the COVID-19 lockdown from their home. The work is a facet of a larger effort that includes more than 4,000 sounds across 100 countries and territories.

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

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this blog did not include a list of projects in Latin America and listed the wrong number of projects in East Asia and Pacific. We apologize for the error.