Sharing Data to Combat the Pandemic and Spark Economic Growth

BY KIM GAGNÉ

As we ride the COVID-19 tiger, we look to our political leaders to provide us with safe routes to physical and economic health. To our frustration, the novel character of the situation leaves certainty in short supply.

The hopeful musings of politicians do not always inspire confidence. Fortunately, the growing set of data points regarding the virus and its impacts provide us hope that at least some of aspects of the normal order will soon be restored.

As we have alternated between hopefulness and despair, many of us have embraced the maxim of the late management guru W. Edward Deming: “In God we trust. All others bring data.” We have come to insist that any prescriptions regarding a safe way forward be grounded in hard facts.

Fortunately, several programs promoting the sharing of data are already well-established. Making data available to be shared and reused by others has been the central goal of the “open data” movement. Open data proponents have highlighted the extent to which big technology companies are able to feed vast amounts of data into the algorithms that power the development of artificial intelligence applications. The open data movement would democratize both the availability of data and the capacity to process it.

Beyond helping us directly deal with health issues, the sharing of data will help us respond to the economic and social challenges that will endure long after the pandemic crisis has been resolved.

One of the most prominent proponents of open data is the London-based Open Data Institute (ODI). Since its founding by Sirs Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt in 2012, ODI has promoted the use of open data to affect positive change across the globe. The ODI offers free support to make data, models, and software as open as possible.

ODI has joined the COVID-19 battle, running a program of free support to organizations who have data they think could help the world navigate the pandemic. Its program is targeted at a diverse set of groups including public authorities collecting data about COVID-19 and the capacity of the health system, developers building symptom-checking apps who want to contribute the data collected to inform a national response, and companies with data about consumer demand or business impact which could be of benefit in addressing supply chain concerns.

The efforts of ODI are echoed by government initiatives. For example, the European Commission has joined EU Member States and research partners in the launch of a European COVID-19 Data Platform. The platform is meant to provide a space where researchers can store and share datasets on everything from clinical trials to DNA sequences.

Beyond helping us directly deal with health issues, the sharing of data will help us respond to the economic and social challenges that will endure long after the pandemic crisis has been resolved. For several years we have witnessed the gradual development of the “digital economy”—an economy based on the internet, mobile technology, and the internet of things. The pandemic disruption has supercharged the move to digitize our lives, accelerating the utilization of new technologies to organize our social and working worlds.

The pooling and constant re-evaluation of data enables policy makers to make informed decisions regarding steps that should be taken to ameliorate the health, social, and economic effects of the pandemic.

Open data will be the fuel for much of that activity. A survey of the types of start-ups supported by the ODI before the crisis reveals the breadth of sectors that benefit from enhanced access to data. Among the projects are London-based CarbonCulture, a service that helps businesses meet their sustainability goals; Madrid-based Cropti, a producer of agriculture management applications; and Kuala Lumper-based Katsana, a provider of fleet management systems.

That the scale and pace of such projects will accelerate after the pandemic has passed is witnessed by Microsoft’s April announcement that it will fully support the open data movement. Microsoft said that it would collaborate with other organizations—notably ODI—on opening up some of its own data for wider use, while creating standardized tools and legal frameworks to make it easier for others to do the same. Microsoft said that it is seeking to diminish the “data divide” that threatens the future prosperity of companies and countries with access to less data.

With respect to the pandemic itself, Microsoft has highlighted its support of the Open Research Dataset, a free resource from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence that is meant to provide data access to governments around the world as they fashion their responses to the pandemic. In addition, Microsoft is working with Adaptive Biotechnologies to map the immune response to COVID-19 and making findings available on an open data platform.

The benefits of shared data become more apparent to us each day. The pooling and constant re-evaluation of data enables policy makers to make informed decisions regarding steps that should be taken to ameliorate the health, social, and economic effects of the pandemic.

We may all hope that knowledge sharing will bring our struggles with the pandemic to a prompt conclusion. We may hope, too, that data sharing will prompt social and economic advances that will positively impact all aspects of our lives in the decades ahead. We can help realize that aspiration by supporting initiatives that promote widespread sharing of data.

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Kim Gagné is a Pacific Council member and a London-based advocate and counsellor with experience in law, diplomacy, and government relations.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.