Episode 7 - The Covid-19 Dashboard for Scotland
STA Volunteers Luke Woollett and Donal Stewart discuss the launch of the new Covid-19 Dashboard for Scotland, how it came into being and why it's both an important project for our volunteers and valuable tool for the public.
Transcript
We talk to volunteers Luke Woollett and Donal Stewart about the new Covid-19 Dashboard for Scotland.
Graham Johnston 0:10
Hello, and welcome to the Scottish Tech Army Podcast. This is episode number seven. I'm Graham Johnston and this is my second time of co-hosting with Kirsty and she's like she's allowed me to do the intro. So something must have gone all right in the last one. Hi, Kirsty
Kirsty McIntosh 0:25
Hi there, how are you doing?
Graham Johnston 0:26
Very good, thank you and delighted to welcome two of our guests today, Luke Woollett and Donal Stewart. Hi gents.
Donal Stewart 0:33
Yeah.
Luke Woollett 0:34
Hello.
Graham Johnston 0:35
Thanks for joining us. And on this episode, we're going to explore an amazing piece of work that's been done for the Scottish Tech Army in collaboration with a number of different sources to bring to life the detail around the Scottish Tech Army's Homebrew Challenge which we're going to explore a little bit more in detail throughout the podcast. Hope you enjoy listening and welcome to everybody.
So first of all, let's get some introductions from both Luke and Donal, who are joining us. Maybe a quick introduction as to what got you involved in the Scottish Tech Army and a little bit about your background. So let's start with you, Luke.
Luke Woollett 1:31
Yes, thanks, Graham. So I've been in IT as a kind of project manager for the last just under 12 years. At the start of lockdown, just when when kind of the pandemic was reaching its peak and things were starting to be closed down. I was really looking for some way that I can help, some way that I could contribute and whilst I was fortunate to kind of retain my day job during that the Tech Army gave me an opportunity to kind of volunteer evenings and weekends and really look for a way that I could give back to the the wider community, charities and other organisations in Scotland.
Graham Johnston 2:06
Fantastic. Thanks for that and I'm sure we're gonna explore just the impact you've had on this as well throughout this podcast. So welcome. And hi Donal.
Donal Stewart 2:14
Hiya. I'm a contract software engineer and part time scientist. During the pandemic, I've been in between contracts and I wanted to help out where I could. So the STA is one of a number of response projects I'm working on. I'm just trying to help where I can.
Graham Johnston 2:37
Fantastic. Well, thank you both for joining and, and taking part in the podcast and thanks for everything you've done and we are going to explore on this podcast exactly what you have been working on which, you know, as a very serious topic, but I do think that the the product that's been developed is going to help massively with, you know, something that's engulfed our lives over the last few months. hugely which is COVID-19 of course and what the projects that is known as the internal homebrew challenge at Scottish tech army has done is produced a COVID-19 dashboard for Scotland's. So, Kirsty, I think it's fair to say that this you know that this is a it's a big project for the Scottish tech army but has got us got some serious connotations to it. And I think we want to explore on this this podcast exactly what the idea was behind it, how it came about, but also how it's going to be used for good in Scotland. First of all, how did this come about? How did the project initiate.
Luke Woollett 3:38
So just to provide a little bit of the background, as you said, this was what we refer to in the sta as a homebrew challenge. And really, that is akin to a hack event or a hackathon, which we see a lot in the IT community. The challenge was set by the STA to look at the COVID-19 open data that was made available by Scottish Government. And really it had an open book to do what we wanted with it and you know, really go out and try and identify a need, identify an opportunity or something that we could produce with that data. A number of teams were formed. I think we had four teams in total. And interestingly, each of them took quite a similar approach and really where all the teams went to was looking at a way that we could visualise the data and make it easier to interpret for members of the Scottish community. From our group, very early on, we took heavy inspiration from the John Hopkins University COVID-19 dashboard. It's something which is widely used, it's been picked up by the media, and we saw a real opportunity to take that which was very much on a global scale and providing kind of granularity for the US and adapt it for for Scotland. And that's really what what we've done. We went through a two week event, working with with a wider team and as well as trying to produce a key product at the end and something that would add value, what we also did was really focus on mentoring and enhancing the skills of the members of the team that we had. So within the team, the initial team, we had of five peoplem three of those actually were very recent graduates from either college or Codeclan, had very little kind of professional experience in developments in IT. So as well as working to deliver a product very quickly, we tried to provide a typical project structure around that, typical governance standards and guidelines that we could work towards.
Graham Johnston 5:37
Fantastic and I mean, I'm, I've got it open on my on my screen next to me, and, you know, the UX on it is really great. It's a fantastic piece of work. And so but obviously, this is a podcast where people can't see what I'm looking at right now. Can you just describe to the listeners what it is that they're going to get when this gets launched tomorrow?
Luke Woollett 5:58
Absolutely so the aim is to make the COVID-19 data as easy to use and accessible as possible. What we've aimed to do is deliver a dashboard which visualises all the key COVID-19 data. We hear a lot of information on the news about local lockdowns, local spikes and things like that. And we've really tried to interpret that and distil it down to a visual interface, which shows you how many cases are there in your local area? How many cases are there in your local health board area? What is the overall trends that we're seeing from cases. We hear a lot about flatten the curve? Have we started to do that are we starting to see early signs of a second spike? And what we've done is introduced a number of visualisations around tests around sadly, deaths around cases on those different levels really to allow individuals to access that data when they need it.
Graham Johnston 6:53
Thanks very much Luke and as we said, you know, some some really important bits of information there. And I think Donal, we're gonna come to you in a second and talk about how this was all developed. Because you know, the amount of work that has - must have gone on in the background to, to create this is, is substantial. But in terms of the relevance of how this data is going to be used now, we are, unfortunately in a period where there are local spikes and local lock downs. And I guess the granularity of this data is is really going to help local councils and health boards to be able to see this data in one place and be able to identify those those spikes. So Donal, let's, let's come to you and just I'm intrigued to establish, you know, how much work went on behind the scenes in terms of getting this data into a format that could be used to, to bring it all together into the UX that I'm seeing in front of me right now.
Donal Stewart 7:55
Okay, for the original challenge, it was solid three weeks of work for the team, two weeks for the initial challenge. And then one week for merging the various teams puts together into one application. Since then, we've been working on it off and on. And the last couple of weeks we've been pushing to bring it up to a production, public readiness. So there's been a fair bit of work. There's been a core team and then we've had inputs from various other members of the larger team for things like UX, data analysis, coming up with new ways of representing the data, and ways of easily communicating the data to the general public.
Luke Woollett 8:49
And I think that communication piece is really important. We've done a lot of research with end users, and both through people that we know as well as reaching out to user testing platforms. And the kind of common thread that we've seen is, you know, a lack of understanding, a lack of clarity around what those numbers and what that data actually means. And I was speaking a couple of weeks ago to someone who is, is shielding. And they were advised as shielding started to be lifted to monitor their local levels of cases. What they were actually having to do was go on their local authority website every day, write down the number of cases and subtract, subtract the previous day's cases from that to see what the trend was, what the impact was, so they can make a decision. What the team have done a really good job here is simplifying that write down so you can load it up each day. And you can see, well, actually over the last five days in Aberdeenshire, there's been 100 cases or they've been 20 cases almost before. And that's going to allow members of the public to to grow in confidence as measures continue to be reduced. But it's also going to allow companies and businesses to make informed decisions around what's going on in their area.
Graham Johnston 9:58
Completely agree. I mean, I'm looking at it right now, and I think, you know, you do want to know, you know, my, I've got a nine year old, and he's just going back to school. And, you know, I also I'm the coach of his football team, community football team. And, you know, it's been a, it's been a long time coming to get them back playing football in a controlled environment. And, you know, looking forward to getting back to playing matches. And obviously, you know, currently current guidance says that that will be in September for friendlies and then and competitive games in October, but you do need to be able to see the trends so that you can take decisions yourself, and I think it does put that decision making back into people's hands. And also, I guess the impact of not following the guidelines also makes it really visible, doesn't it and the story you've just told there of someone having to go and try and crunch that data themselves. That's a huge additional stress on top of what is already a really anxious period of time for people. So I think it's it showcases the data in a very clear way. So, Kirsty
Kirsty McIntosh 11:01
Well, yeah, I just, one of the things I wanted to kind of remind us, I suppose of was that the the initial conversation that was had about the homebrew challenge was that it was an internal challenge. And that the final week of the challenge the third week was actually to present this data to Scottish Government because they were the ones that were encouraging the tech army to take a look and see if we could come up with something that was that was new and a bit different sort of a related about all that and and it was really great for the team to, you know, basically work together and kind of bootstrap that that dashboard right out and and and learn what it was like to work within a bigger team. Did you find that week quite hard, Luke? Was it Donal was it? Was it quite a bit of a stress? Was it welcoming new members into the team and trying to deliver in a week?
Luke Woollett 11:48
I think you're right there. One of the big challenges was around expanding the team. From the very, very beginning one of the hardest parts here, and it's something that isn't STA specific it's happening all over the country and the world is this idea of working with teams that you're not in contact with and in this situation, I think that was compounded by the fact that none of us had ever met. So we didn't have any common ground. So there was a lot of work up front around communication around defining ways of working. And then when we moved into that third week, you were suddenly saying, right, well take these four teams who kind of found a way to work together, and now you're smashing them together to then make one giant team. And I think in that situation, you then had challenges around different technology solutions, which are coming together, you had individuals who potentially have found their role within their initial team, but someone else had that role in the other teams and therefore how do we merge so it was really kind of accelerating that. But I think at the end of the day, the chance for the team to get to present what they did to the key members of Scottish Government and wider stakeholders was fantastic and going back again to you know, how new so many people who run these teams were to a proper development project, and that they could look back at the end when we got to that and said, right, not only did we deliver a product that can add value, but we followed a proper project methodology. We followed development standards, we had peer review processes, we used industry leading tools to do that. It's something that people can put on their CV so it's it's they're not just giving back to the community, but it's also helping individuals with that personal development.
Kirsty McIntosh 13:29
Yeah, it's been a fantastic experience. And even for me, I was part of that sort of peer review group that that that major Zoom wall that you were all presenting to what night is sort of in terms of your presentation preparations for for Scottish Government, it was really nice to actually almost say that you played a tiny part and you know, kind of listening to all of that it was really, really good. And I do know we have had a podcast interview with with two of the members of the team there. Rhi batstone and Riccy Clark. And they both said that they had learned so much from that whole experience and they actually working with two different types of teams that also been a really sort of crucial part of it as well. Donal, I was wondering, can you tell us a little bit about how you managed to pull together all of this data from all these different collection points that's held in lots of different ways and clean it all up and validate it? I suppose before you actually visualise it on the dashboard. Was that a real challenge for you?
Donal Stewart 14:23
The hard part initially was finding the data. So we investigated multiple data sources from either the government or direct from the NHS or various places and various ways of accessing it. Because it's a an online dashboard, we need a live feed of the data. So it took us a while to obtain the raw data but in such a way that it was continually updated or daily updated. So eventually, I mean, we find the data sources. On the ones we settled with, most of the front, front end data comes directly from the NHS open data servers. And it's in a nice format, and it's nicely accessible. So there's not much in the way of data cleaning needed. All we have to do is bring it down every day after it's published. I think it's published 2pm every day. So we take it after that, and then we make it accessible and dashboard.
Kirsty McIntosh 15:28
That's absolutely brilliant. I mean, it does, it looks absolutely superb. The dashboard shows everything from a kind of heat map of of cases rising or falling, whatever it is that you want to see, that allows you to look as Graham said, in terms of health board area, but also allows you to look at council area, which I think would be really fantastic for people trying to make a decision about whether to head to the Highlands for their holidays and things like that so they can have a look and see and actually even to go back and look at that data and see how that behaviour actually had an impact on the movement of the virus around the country. So it's been absolutely superb. What's what's coming up next, if you've got hopes for it, for it to change slightly or iterate as the weeks and months go on from here?
Donal Stewart 16:13
It is continually under development. We've just added a feedback mechanism. So we've added a link to an email. So if people have suggestions of what they think would work, we'd be happy to hear them. Right now, we're currently working on making the regional view of data more specific, because that's what's becoming more important rather than the overall sort of trend. So, yeah, currently work in progress.
Kirsty McIntosh 16:43
Fantastic. And one of the things that has really interested me is is somebody I believe is working on sonification of the data rather than visualisation of it. So you can actually hear what's happening in the country, rather than than seeing it. Can you tell us a little bit about that, Luke?
Luke Woollett 17:02
Absolutely. So we have Eirini, who's joined the during the team since we did that presentation Scottish Government. And one of the key bits of feedback that we had during that session was around considering some of the accessibility requirements. And that's something that we really tried to focus on since we did that presentation moving forward to making it a product that we can go live with. So there's been a lot of work on going in the background around colour schemes, accessibility compatible screen readers, but I think the biggest challenge was how do you how do you provide an alternative to graphs? And how do you provide a way of allowing individuals with visual impairments to access that a team went away did a lot of research particularly Eirini and came back with some very interesting research has been done in other fields around sonification. So using sounds to visualise datasets, and certainly from what we can see it's something that's not being done that widely and it doesn't appear to have been done at all for COVID data. And what happens is if you're using the screen reader, when you access the website, instead of having the graph, you will actually get an audio file, which uses pitch to dictate the points on the, on the graph. It's not something that's going to be available in the release that goes out tomorrow. We wanted to kind of get the baseline stabilised first, but it's something that we're going to be rapidly iterating and bringing on over the next couple of weeks.
Graham Johnston 18:26
That is phenomenal. Such a great way of making the data accessible to everybody and fantastic. So people listening to this and they know it's coming out tomorrow. Probably the first thing in their head is where where do I go to get it?
Luke Woollett 18:42
So I think the easiest way to find it will be to go to the Scottish tech army website, and it's going to be included in the navigation from there from tomorrow. There's also going to be a lot of activity on the Scottish Tech Army social media as well which will be sharing the link as well.
Kirsty McIntosh 18:57
So that's the Scottish #TechArmy.org. For anybody looking make sure you bookmark it on your favourite browsers.
Graham Johnston 19:05
Scottishtecharmy.org and that is exactly what I was doing there. I was bringing it up in front of me. Fantastic. Probably a question leading on from that. Luke or Donal is when will that data be refreshes or a particular time? Is it overnight? Or is it a certain time in the day? Or is it is it live data as you get it through from all the different feeds?
Donal Stewart 19:28
It depends on the actual data source. Currently, we have three sources of the data. The NHS data seems to be updated daily at 2pm. So we will get it within an hour. We check for the data every so often. So after two it will be refreshed and that'll be the main part of the maps and the main set of stats and numbers. We also provide a feed of news items from the Scottish Government and that's updated every hour and there's links from our view of it to the original articles at the Scottish Government where people can go for more information.
Graham Johnston 20:10
Fantastic. Thanks very much. And I think it's going to be a resource which I feel is going to be useful for a number of different people and different organisations to be able to clearly see the trends and the visualisation of this data in a really user friendly format.
Kirsty McIntosh 20:31
Yeah, and I think also, it's a testament to that diverse thinking that's available within the Scottish Tech Army as well that really, the tech army itself is only four months old. And out of that we already have something this extraordinary and I think that's, you're to be commended for that I think is absolutely superb. I'm really looking forward to having access to that data myself so I can make decisions about you know, how I live my life up here in my part of the world too. So congratulations, guys. It's absolutely superb.
Graham Johnston 21:01
Indeed. And, um, I'm sure you know, in a few weeks' time, once we've, when this is this is out there, I'm fairly sure that there'll be a number of media outlets that will probably be reporting on it as well. It will be great to to get you guys back after a few weeks, and maybe on another version of the podcast just to sort of, you know, share some of the insights and some of the feedback that you've been receiving and also, maybe some of the future iterations with this dashboard, because it does sound like this is, you know, release one but there's several other releases that may happen as a result as you learn and then develop the platform more. So great to have you back on in a future episode, Kirsty I'm sure you'll agree, and just hear what's been going on and what their actions been and, and also, you know, how many people are viewing this and who's viewing it and what people have been used for. So well done, though, absolutely incredible.
Kirsty McIntosh 21:54
Yeah, I think the story will run and run so we'll look forward to having a chat with you again in a few weeks time, guys. Thanks for your time today.
Graham Johnston 22:01
Thank you very much, guys.
Donal Stewart 22:02
Cheers.
Luke Woollett 22:03
Thank you very much for having us.
Graham Johnston 22:04
A great episode there Kirsty I'm sure you'll agree. Some really, really good insights from the team. And again, just as you said, just shows the the diverse set of skills and talent that exists within the Scottish tech army and being able to take all of that data, pull it into one place and then creates such a visual dashboard that will help people to make their own decisions is testament to the work that's been done.
Kirsty McIntosh 22:31
Absolutely. It is the epitome of tech for good. It's absolutely fantastic.
Graham Johnston 22:36
Absolutely. Well, thanks everyone for listening. And we will be in the same place same time next week with another episode of the Scottish Tech Army Podcast. Thanks for listening.
Kirsty McIntosh 22:47
Bye for now.