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.

Understanding the Value and Role of Mobility Data

Earlier this month, The GovLab, Cuebiq, and Open Data Institute released “The Use of Mobility Data for Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” which relied on several case studies to look at the opportunities, risks, and challenges…

by Andrew J. Zahuranec, Stefaan Verhulst, Andrew Young, Aditi Ramesh, and Brennan Lake

Mobility data is data about the geographic location of a device passively produced through normal activity. Throughout the pandemic, public health experts and public officials have used mobility data to understand patterns of COVID-19’s spread and the impact of disease control measures. However, privacy advocates and others have questioned the need for this data and raised concerns about the capacity of such data-driven tools to facilitate surveillance, improper data use, and other exploitative practices.

In April, The GovLab, Cuebiq, and the Open Data Institute released The Use…

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a crisis the likes of which the world has not seen in generations — harming communities around the globe. As countries such as the United States and France sought to harness new and innovative data sources to better understand and respond to the crisis, the data assets in many low- and middle-income countries remained under-developed. Many of these countries were on the African continent, where data stores can be lacking and vaccine access remains limited.

Understanding that policymakers need detailed analysis and practical ideas to guide their decisions, The GovLab joined forces with the French…

by Andrew J. Zahuranec, Aditi Ramesh, Andrew Young, Stefaan Verhulst, and Brennan Lake

Thinking about March 2020 can be a surreal experience. This time last year, people around the world were just entering lockdown — for what many assumed would be a few weeks. Restaurants and hotels shut their doors. Busy squares emptied out. People around the world dramatically altered their movements to avoid spreading the disease to their neighbors and loved ones. For some time, the impact of these changes remained unclear.

To understand the cumulative effects of these shocks on disease spread, researchers and policymakers scrambled to find…

This summary was originally published by the OECD on its website.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the demand for access to timely, relevant, and quality data.

This demand has been driven by several needs: taking informed policy actions quickly, improving communication on the current state of play, carrying out scientific analysis of a dynamic threat, understanding its social and economic impact, and enabling civil society oversight and reporting.

This report, prepared by the OECD Digital Government and Data Unit and the NYU’s The GovLab, assesses how open government data (OGD) was used to react and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic…

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.

Highlighting Efforts of Call for Action Signatories

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.

Reflecting on a Year Since the Call for Action to Build the Data Infrastructure and Ecosystem We Need

One year since our call for action

By Andrew J. Zahuranec, Stefaan Verhulst, and Andrew Young

A year ago, the COVID-19 pandemic became real for people across the world. Though the spectre of the virus had been seen in the days and weeks before, by March 2020, normalcy gave way to a new reality. Billions learned unfamiliar terminology such as “social distancing” and “flattening the curve.” National and local leaders instituted restrictions on schools, businesses, and places of worship. Signs of sickness and death became unavoidable. As the toll mounted, leaders around the world scrambled to find ways to address each of these consequences.

It was in…