The COVID dashboard for Scotland
As the criticality of the coronavirus pandemic has receded, we took the decision recently to retire the COVID dashboard that was created early in the pandemic by a very committed group of volunteers in the Scottish Tech Army. The project that created the dashboard was interesting for a number of reasons and we wanted to reflect on the project, what it delivered and what we learned from it.
Thinking back to the early days of the pandemic, there was a great deal of uncertainty around the situation in different areas and how that was changing over time in terms of case numbers, fatalities, etc. From an early stage, the Scottish Government committed to making the data available under its open data initiative and was publishing the data on the gov.scot web site. At the time, the data was shared as Excel spreadsheets that could be downloaded and reviewed – while this was a useful data set, it was less accessible to many people that did not have or were not confident in using a spreadsheet application. At the same time, within the Scottish Tech Army, we had had a lot of people step forward as volunteers with data and coding skills, so we came up with the idea of setting a challenge to the community to see what they could come up with as ways to visualise the data in an easier way for non-specialists.
Rather than running a single conventional project, we decided to set it up as a challenge format, encouraging groups of volunteers to self-organise into teams and create their own prototypes of an application to display the data. We also time-boxed the project to two weeks, to encourage the teams to be as agile and creative as possible in a short span of time. The members of the teams didn’t know each other outside the Scottish Tech Army environment and by necessity all of the work was done by remote collaboration.
Four groups of volunteers got together to create prototypes and presented them to an audience of volunteers from the community. The resulting prototypes were, of course, different in their approaches and presentation, but all of them had interesting ideas about how best to present the data. One thing that shone through all of the presentations was the level of commitment and enthusiasm from the members of all of the teams. There was a wide range of experience amongst the members of the teams ranging from people just getting started on their career journey in tech to veterans with decades of experience – all of them enjoyed that range of experience and ideas and it undoubtedly helped to stimulate the enthusiasm within the groups.
Having seen what had been achieved so quickly and with diverse thinking, we encouraged the teams to get together to work on a combined version that took elements from each of the prototypes to create a more fully functional dashboard that would provide a level of insight that was not available elsewhere and in a form that was much more accessible to a wide audience. All of the teams signed up for the challenge and they were given a further two weeks to work on the combined version.
True to form, the teams delivered a second-generation dashboard on time and we held another presentation to the community to showcase the work that had been done. The level of capability that the dashboard represented was very impressive, so much so that we decided to launch it as a public service a few weeks later with some additional enhancements that the team was keen to implement. Included in these was a technique called sonification – the use of sound frequency to represent values in a data set. This was designed to make the data accessible to people with visual impairment, allowing them to listen to the trends in the data rather than having to view it on a screen.
The COVID dashboard service was maintained actively until August 2022, a two-year commitment from the team of volunteers that had been involved in developing it. It was a landmark project for the Scottish Tech Army in a number of ways and there were several elements of it that stand out for us:
The power of a clear objective and a tight deadline – the urgency of the situation in June 2020 meant that the value of creating a visualisation that was accessible to a broad audience was clear to the teams. Time-boxing the activity into two 2-weeks windows meant that the teams really focussed on getting a working prototype built within the time available and their creativity was harnessed in a very productive way.
The potential of self-organising teams – the challenge that we set was an open invitation to anyone in the community that wanted to get involved – we didn’t assign people to teams, and we didn’t tell them how to go about it. People reached out to others they had met in the community and formed their own teams, defined their own approach and worked on the implementation in whatever way they thought best.
The value of open data – the project was only made possible because of the decision taken within Scottish Government at an early stage to make the COVID data available publicly and on a daily-update frequency. This meant that the data was both authoritative and always up to date. As a result, it enabled the creation of a valuable resource to the citizens of Scotland that became a regular reference point for many people to stay informed about the progression, both good and bad, of the pandemic.
In total, more than 50 people were involved in the project in some capacity, one of the largest project teams that we have had in the lifetime of the Scottish Tech Army. It has been a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved by a committed and enthusiastic team of volunteers. The whole Community within the Scottish Tech Army has taken great pride in what this group achieved, alongside the great work of so many others on a wide range or projects large and small since our launch in April 2020.
Our sincere thanks and congratulations go to everyone involved in the project – many were starting their career journeys and many of them are now in excellent jobs in the tech industry, taking the experience they gained with them as they continue to build their skills, experience and networks. All of them can look back with pride on the role they played in this landmark project.