The ODAMAP project is the direct consequence of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 and mobilization of public servants.
Origins and context
During the 2020 covid-19 crisis ODAMAP was developped in emergency, as part of the French government’s intention to communicate about public efforts to help the private sector in a time of economic uncertainty.
The first instance of ODAMAP displayed data concerning the “solidarity fund”. This fund aimed to help independant workers and small businesses, allowing them to receive money while the economy was frozen.
This fund was supplemented by the State but also by the local governments, so it was interesting to have an idea of how this financial effort was distributed either on the national territory or by sectors.
Furthermore the amount of this fund (nationaly and regionaly) was quickly changing on a daily basis. It was important to reflect in simili-realtime how those amounts were evolving, given the fact the effort can be counted into billions of euros.
To sum up the info, visualize, and communicate on this fund, the French government and the ministry for Economics and Finances asked the DINUM to realize a dashboard about this fund. ODAMAP is how this dashboard was realized first.
References
ODAMAP was inspired by other tools, mainly by the covid-19 dashboard.
The COVID-19 dashboard : health data
Quickly after the beginning of the health crisis the French government needed to communicate on covid-19 data : number of people sick, hospitalized, cured… The French government missionned a team from DINUM/Etalab to quickly work on a dashboard to communicate on those numbers. This first tool gave a very complete idea of the importance of the crisis on the sanitary level.
Communicate on the global effort against the virus
Other policies and administrations begun to gather data and gave a complementary idea of the importance of the crisis, particularly on the national economy.
One of the first goals for ODAMAP was to mimic the “covid-19” dashboard so to display other data relative to the fight against the virus, mainly economic data.
The covid-19 pandemic showed how the response against such a crisis needs to gather informations from a lot of distinct fields to be able to coordinate the actions.
Open data policies in France
Since the beginning of open data movements France follows a coherent policy to help reduce the gap between public data and the society.
Open data and transparency
Open data policies can be seen as an effort of the administration to be more transparent. Civil society members, journalists, associations and non-profit, watch the public policies and take into account data produced by the administrations. More largely open data policies could help regaining trust between the administration and the citizen.
Open data and valorization
Open data policies can also be seen as a tool to highlight the value of data produced by the public sector, or even foster reuses of this data. Many private services nowadays uses data produced by the administrations : transports, health, geocoding… It is a part of the public service’s mission to prove open data could be useful for public information and create new services from the private sector.
Open data and public services efficiency
Another goal of open data policies could be to help data circulate between the many administration services and levels. A public adminiistration is by definition constituted by multiple entities, and make the information fluidly circulate between those entities is a challenge. Teams change, services could be located in different parts of the nation, skills are different from one team to another… But many of those services either have to share data to others, or even rely on data produced by others.
ODAMAP goals
Born in the context we described above, ODAMAP goals could be summed up as follow :
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Help citizen and administrations to highlight and navigate open datasets, or groups of open datasets relative to a common topic, we developped ODAMAP. This 100% open source project basically propose some veery common and basic features any other dattavisualisation website / service could propose : interactive maps, interactive charts, custom texts, custom colors…
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Facilitate the circulation of open data. During the covid-19 crisis we observed one of the cornerstones of public services efficiency was the data and its circulation : either data was important in decision-making processes at the executive level, or data was an important part of the communication tpwards the citizen so to inform the public with the most recent and reliable data.
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Simplify and lower the costs of deploying a dashboard. Though having updated datasets is a big part of the administration efficiency, displaying them in an understable way could be a challenge by itself. Very specialized data could be hard to interpret or communicate by new publics, often we need datavisualisation tools to help those public grasp the specificities of such data. We needed at the same time a tool we could readapt to new datasets, and something anyone could reuse for no cost.
A tool for times of crisis
During a period of crisis we observed the time is a precious commodity. In normal times deploying a dashboard could be a years-long project. But the emergency we lived during the covid-19 crisis didn’t allow suh delays before communicating to the public or between administration.
To help communicating or decision-making it appeared crucial to mobilize complex tools quickly, efficiently, and lightly (not depending on too complex infrastructures).
A tool for open data in general, crisis or not
We believe we could gain something positive from times of crisis too. We think the ODAMAP dashboard tool could be helpful in many situations : quickly deploy a dashboard without depending on a proprietary solution, making POC, empower non-profit sector to use open data for its work…
Far from being perfect ODAMAP could be one of the tools you’d like to use when it comes to open data, because we believe the more people access, understand, and use openn data, the better democracies will thrive…
the ODAMAP team