#OpenDataSavesLives - COVID-19

#OpenDataSavesLives is a core theme of ODI Leeds - sitting alongside Open Transport, Open Gov Tech, and being Radically Open - and helps to guide our work. As part of the future strategy, we wanted to use radical collaboration methods and an open approach to innovation and apply it to this concept of 'open data saves lives' for the benefit of everyone.

The first few months of 2020 will be remembered for the outbreak of COVID-19, a new type of coronavirus and part of the same family of viruses as SARS and MERS. Access to good, publicly available data is crucial in a worldwide pandemic - in a rapidly changing situation, it's good to have passionate people who want to explore the data and create things, like visualisations, and it creates wider value and benefits.

ODI Leeds is currently working with their sponsors and partners to document useful resources, create things openly, and enable others to engage with data about the outbreak. Our focus will be the locally relevant use cases, working out what data needs to be published to better understand the impact of coronavirus on local scales.