“EveryoneCounts”: the Social Distancing Dashboard
The "#WirVsVirus Solution Enabler" project "EveryoneCounts" quantifies the impact of Social Distancing on public mobility based on a continuous collection of public data.
Social Distancing is regarded as one of the most important measures to reduce the spread of contagious diseases such as COVID-19. But how can its genuine effects be measured? The “#WirVsVirus Solution Enabler” project “EveryoneCounts” facilitates the quantification of Social Distancings impact on public mobility and therefore also provides tangibility for all societal stakeholders.
Big Data and Social Distancing: how it works
“At https://everyonecounts.de you can see based on multiple data sources how social distancing is being implemented in your region – guaranteed that it’s more objective than in your Twitter Feed,” tweets Phillip Kreißel, who came up with the original idea of a Social Distancing Dashboard.
The visualization of the physical separation is based on the continuous collection of various public data sources and their aggregation into one common data pool. The foundation is provided by data aggregated from public webcams, laser scanners counting pedestrians, urban bicycle counters, live car traffic data and Google Maps check-ins. However, the initiative still aims to augment their data pool with additional sources of data.
In an intuitive online dashboard, live and historical data are then visualized. Anyone can use the website and easily monitor how political measures are affecting different kinds of mobility in different regions relative to pre-COVID-19 numbers. Mobility, for example, refers to the traffic of pedestrians, cars or bicycles.
“EveryoneCounts” is an open data project and therefore makes all information available via an application programming interface (API), which makes it is easy for other projects to build upon their aggregated data pool.
From collective vision towards implementation
The Social Distancing Dashboard formed as part of the German “#WirVsVirus hackathon” – a collaborative event of tech initiators and the German federal government for creating solutions to significant societal problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
To this day not all team members of “EveryoneCounts” know each other personally. Encouraged by a collective vision, they have been working remotely and in their leisure time since the hackathon commenced in march of 2020. From the beginning, their vision was to utilize open data by making it more accessible for all of society, as their very first “#WirVsVirus hackathon” pitch video demonstrates.
#WirVsVirus pitch video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDgcbE-c31c
Today “EveryoneCounts” is part of the “#WirVsVirus Solution Enabler” programme, initiated by the social acceleration platform “Project Together“. With the Vodafone Institute as one of its funding partners, the programme aims to implement the most promising solutions and digital prototypes as quickly as possible.
About the “#WirVsVirus Solution Enabler” programme
The “#WirVsVirus Solution Enabler” is a six-months implementation programme for 130 selected innovative solutions developed for coronavirus-related challenges. The programme that is supported by the Vodafone Institute with startup funding, know-how and digital expertise, encourages projects from 12 action fields, such as health, everyday life and crisis management, to successfully implement their solutions on a broad scale. The Institute supports the project teams with individually tailored support by providing access to the Vodafone corporate network. Particularly the startup programme Vodafone UPLIFT with their PACESETTER offering supports the teams in the areas of IT infrastructure, public cloud, IoT solutions and individual consulting. The programme under the patronage of the Federal Chancellery has started working with the projects on April 8 of 2020. Find further information here.
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