Covid-19 Dashboard for Scotland
In June 2020, we set the members of the Scottish Tech Army a challenge - look at the published data on the Covid-19 pandemic and come up with a way of presenting it in an interactive accessible way that would make the data more available and more usable to people across Scotland - we called it our Homebrew Challenge.
All we gave them as a starting point was a link to the location of the data published by Scottish Government online and left the rest up to them. The response from the team was amazing - 4 teams formed within a day and set to work on their own approaches to the challenge. We gave them two weeks to come up with something culminating in a showcase event online, in which they presented their work to other volunteers within the tech army.
The teams formed from scratch and they had never worked together before, so as well as the challenge itself, there was the additional challenge of working out how they would organise themselves, how they would work together, what tools they would use, etc. The teams were made up of a wide range of skills and experience, including some college and CodeClan graduates that had skills but limited experience of working on a project like this. The senior members of the teams were very proactive in guiding the teams as a whole on best practices and working methods, including pair programming, usability design, software engineering and deployment tools and methodologies.
After the two weeks were up, the showcase event proved very popular with the members of the Scottish Tech Army - it ended up being our largest group video event to date:
We had also told our senior contacts within Scottish Government about the project and they were keen to see the outputs, so we set the teams a further challenge - could they come together as a combined team and take the best of each project and combine them into a single dashboard that we could present to Scottish Government two weeks later? Again, the teams rose to the challenge - in front of an audience made up of the most senior people in Scottish Government and a "“home crowd"“ from the Scottish Tech Army, the combined team presented the results of their work - a very impressive product that had been created from scratch with completely new teams in less than 4 weeks.
Fast forward to August - after various discussions on how best to use the dashboard, the teams knuckled down again to create further enhancements and to make the dashboard production-grade so that we could release it for public access. The public launch takes place today, 2nd September 2020 and we are very pleased to share this with our fellow citizens as an information resource that we hope will prove useful to many citizens across the country to understand the ongoing evolution of the disease and to make informed decisions about how they go about their lives in what remain very fluid times.
In the best tradition of continuous improvement, we have a range of other enhancements that we will be making to the dashboard on an ongoing basis, including the use of sonification to make the data accessible to visually-impaired users of the dashboard.
If you wold like to hear more about the project and the dashboard itself, you can listen to Episode 7 of the STA .Podcast, featuring two of the members of the team that built it, Luke Pritchard-Woollett and Donal Stewart.
We hope you enjoy and find the dashboard useful and please do stay tuned for further improvements.