Our project addresses the challenge ‘Where there’s a link, there’s a way’ by finding a way to present integrated information provided both from Brazilian authorities and from NASA about the environment and the spread of COVID-19.
The provided data is compiled to easily show policy-makers which cities have similar features to theirs, based on the COVID-19 curve and other geographic and environmental criteria. Then, by choosing a city on the map, people can quickly find all true news about how its authorities are dealing with the pandemic.
This will help decision makers evaluate which actions to take and which ones to avoid.
In the future, this platform can evolve to help decision makers from any country to develop any kind of public policy.
Our team was inspired by this challenge mainly because of the possibility to help people through information.
In a world flooded with news coming from everywhere, it is not easy for municipal public managers to make quick and important decisions, especially in Brazilian reality, where there is no national policy concerning the battle against the spread of COVID-19.
After using design methodologies and a digital board in Miro to list the main problems and possible solutions, we defined the project and quickly created a prototype to validate the idea with data analysts and public policies specialists.
At the same time, our team’s developers started working on the databases. For this first version of the project, we chose to limit the range to Brazilian cities mainly because of the restricted time that would not allow us to integrate many databases and solve problems such as the language barrier of the news from other countries. However, we believe that this project could evolve to help any decision maker to compare cities using any criteria, even after the pandemic is over.
We have gathered databases provided by the Brazilian government and by NASA and used Tableau for analysis and to set up a display of the compiled data.
None of the team members knew how to use this tool, so having to learn it during the hackathon was a great challenge.
The next stage was to create a page to capture information from Google News, using Google’s API, Heroku and Javascript.
It was also a challenge to access and use NASA’s databases, since most of them don’t cover the Brazilian territory in a city-level.
Finally, we embedded the Tableau board on the NOVID-20 website.
Brazilian government databases:https://covid.saude.gov.br/ andhttps://www.kaggle.com/pauloeduneves/hdi-brazil-idh-brasil
NASA database:https://airquality.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Tableau Server
Tableau Desktop
Porkbun:https://porkbun.weeblycloud.com/