How the re-use of Open Data helps address COVID-19
Data ecosystems unlocking the value of open data
In a previous blog post, we discussed challenges governments face when releasing open data on COVID-19, demonstrating the need for enhanced public sector data governance frameworks.
Making Open Government Data (OGD) available in the right format is crucial even more in times of pandemic. For the very first time, given the extent of the devastating effects of the COVID-19 and the maturity of the use of data, open data are playing a critical political role in national and international agendas and are praised as vital resources to foster collective intelligence to address this crisis. This is not to mention the call in April 2020 by the WHO to release health data in timely and open format and to strengthen data infrastructures to enable data sharing within and between countries.
But what now? The majority of citizens are not necessarily interested in raw OGD, but more in the services built around them. If interpreted, processed and applied correctly by intermediaries and stakeholders, open data can be used to develop applications, which can improve citizens’ life.
Many questions arise when assessing the use of open data in tackling COVID-19. What types of data are mostly used? With what intention do the ecosystem use these data? Who are the data for? What specific services and solutions are being developed? Are governments and users working together in developing them?
Mapping the use of open data across the pandemic phases
The OECD and the NYU Governance Lab have together launched a call for evidence on the release and use of OGD in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. The list of evidence has classified initiatives into phases reflecting the risk management cycle of the OECD, which are Readiness, Response, Recovery and Reform.
Readiness phase
Regarding the Readiness phase, initiatives are rare. A few countries that have experience with pandemic influenza outbreaks and a strong data governance already in place seem to be somehow better prepared and know how to respond. As seen in a previous blog post, governments with a solid data governance have infrastructure in place that enable them to react faster. The government of Korea for instance reacted promptly, started testing early and releasing ‘high-value data’ to inform citizens and enable the generation of services. Lessons learned from previous experiences paired with strong data governance thus seem to have guided some countries to better prepare their response and recovery to the COVID-19.
Response phase
The predominant use of OGD is to inform citizens and communities about the status of the pandemic. A large number of the collected initiatives address the Response phase of the crisis through the visualisation of interactive dashboards to track the evolution of the pandemic, which are either published jointly by governments in collaboration with partners (such as civil society and academia), by the national or local governments or by private sectors.
For example, the Irish Government paired up with all-Island Research Observatory and Maynooth University and together released a dashboard presenting relevant figures and evidence to monitor the spread of the COVID-19 virus across the country, based on COVID-19 cases as well as georeference data. Another example is Italy. The Italian Health Ministry (Ministero della Salute) released daily official data (national, regional, provincial), which are then elaborated and published by the Civil Protection Department (Dipartimento della Protezione Civile) in the form of a dashboard. Similarly, Colombia used their main OGD portal to not only share data but also health related news. These are great examples of OGD use sharing official data to serve society and inform citizens.
Another proof that if done well, OGD can also extend its ecosystem and benefit the private sector to create services. To illustrate this, in New Zealand, Ping Insights built a dashboard using data from the Ministry of Health website. These initiatives show the reactiveness of stakeholders and their unity facing the unprecedented crisis.
However, we also see that the lack of coherent release and governance of open data may create multiple channels to inform the public. This is the case of Chile, where the government has released two official open data dashboards by the Digital Government Division and the Ministry of Science and Technology, both using the data released by the Ministry of Health.
Recovery phase
Moving on to the Recovery phase, which is another much-needed phase to heal from the pandemic, a few initiatives have been collected and they mostly help to identify availability of supplies. As an example, the city of Issy-les-Moulineaux in France released a list of shops and restaurants offering delivery services to help individuals find support they need at a local level.
Besides, the government of Korea released datasets on supply of public mask information for each vendor and region based on address and coordinates. They also invite developers to use the data for mobile applications and web services to inform the location of authorised stores and the number of masks available to facilitate citizens’ purchase. In addition to this, while the conversation of a COVID tracing app is currently going on in a large majority of countries, the COVID-19 Korea dataset with patient routes and visualiser is another advanced service, which provides information on COVID-19 patient routes, patient’s age/ gender/diagnosed date.
Reform phase
No initiatives have yet entered the Reform phase, which is the post-pandemic management phase. Is this because countries are still fighting the pandemic in the previous phases or have they not been thinking long term enough? Some preliminary findings could be observed through the call for evidence. The most advanced initiatives were able to emerge thanks to solid foundations, right data governance and strong collaborations, which can determine the sustainability of these initiatives. Governments should put in place constant engagement mechanism with stakeholders in order to react rapidly and implement actions according to conditions of data use previously set when needed to have long term impacts, which loops back to the Readiness phase.
Drawing upon the responses collected from the call, many discussions and questions surface. Why is there such a large number of dashboards and so little of other services? There is no doubt that one way to respond to the crisis is using dashboards to track disease spread, but not only, what about understanding public perceptions and behavior, or alleviating pandemic-related unemployment and poverty? What about taking a retrospective look to understand if these dashboards brought to the citizens the info and assistance they needed? And what about workers supplies, how are they guaranteed protections? Based on the call for evidence, there seems to be a lack of data and services providing answers to these questions, which could also be additional elements to help to prepare, respond and recover from such crisis. If there are any initiatives answering these questions that need to be brought to light, I would invite you to share them in the call.
This also leads me to wonder whether the release of data guides the innovation of services or the need of a service enables a specific set of data to be released. Do governments releasing OGD communicate efficiently the services they wanted to see emerged out of the datasets? Are users consulted and engaged beforehand to understand the type of services needed? Are stakeholders and civil societies working closely with the government more likely to provide sharper services, due to better communication?
One thing is certain, a strong data ecosystem would be necessary to address not only the pandemic today but also ideally prevent or better prepare governments for other crisis tomorrow. A common challenge to data ecosystem is the lack of a space or a network to exchange successful data stories and build awareness and understanding of needs and interests of different stakeholders. This is why the OECD has collaborated with the Open Data Charter and other organisations and launched a guide to Open Data Meetups, which aim is to bring stakeholders together around the topic of open data and build stronger tights for a more solid relationship between governments, civil society/innovators and citizens. Collective intelligence serving Covid-19 should bring more meaningful and value-driven open data interventions.
The OECD and NYU will continue collecting evidence on the use of open data to address the Covid-19. We invite you to submit your case to our open call for evidence, as new data needs and uses will emerge with the progress of the pandemic.
