Conversation about Julia and Pinar joining the Amsterdam Corona Prevention Team at the GGD
About the corona prevention team:
- Karen den Hertog is the head of the recent “Corona Prevention Team” at the GGD. Karen has public administration background and has worked for the city of Amsterdam during the last 10 years. She develops several approaches to analyze and understand for complex problems.
- The group started to operate in spring 2020. They work to build a “corona proof live”. The team consists of 12 people at the moment. It is an interdisciplinary group of researchers, communicators, behavioural researchers, policy makers, strategic thinking people...
- Currently it’s a one-year project.
- In the Corona case, they are aware that they need to apply a systems approach, but the interventions are still applied at a local scale. Therefore, design should be a part of the developed methodologies.
- The group is working with no time, in a kind-of emergency state and in short cycle interventions. Right now, the group works with public data about infection and the spread of infections to make more appropriate regulations and to help people stay healthy. Learning by doing. New government regulations, how to adapt to them or translate them.
- They also work with the national strategies. The National team is thinking about people who self-quarantine – maybe using phone data to know how many people stay indeed at home and comply with that. Knowing what people are doing. However, the strategy they are following now is to “only” send information. One of the campaigns for the winter is to keep the virus out of your house. Use stickers to put on the windows with instructions on the inner side about how to take care of each other.
- Karen and her group want to create a werkplaats with senior and junior people (a couple of PhD’s). It is a study case to figure out how to work together and decide on the data infrastructure. Focusing on the data collection.
- They want to understand the rhythm of the Amsterdam residents, the rhythm of the virus and also that of healthy behaviour. For example, for eating the obesity project (aanpak gezond gewicht) has found out that there are 200 conscious decisions people make with food throughout the day. Maybe the corona team can lead to these kinds of results. It will be a pressure cooker for developing ideas.
- Caroline – participation and not only control on the data. Low trust and high trust. They need to move from low trust to high trust because they can’t have that control. Complex system approach.
Collaboration between the City Rhythms team and the Corona prevention team:
- If Pinar and Julia join the team, it will be easy to get the data.
- What is the goal of the GGD? Karen can offer a position of 2 days a week (1 day Pinar 1 day Julia). Starting 1st of November or 1st of December. The main goal of the group is to make the information / data available, get them out of the excel sheets, to get it in other ways. They also want to be able to take a step back and enter into a reflective mode to gain a better perspective of the situation.
- The group wants to reflect about: what do they need for the next few years? Which data do they need? Which ways of thinking? How can they adapt to the “Amsterdam” way of thinking? Which people do they need to reach?
- They are working at a city scale, now the prevention team is also operating per buurt / stadsdeel (stakeholders). Pinar can focus more on Zuidoost because that’s her PhD focus and Julia could work at a larger scale (city)
- The role of the City Rhythms project in the corona prevention team:
- We could develop two case studies around the topic. According to the DRSR research planning, the next 2 cases are on loneliness and children, which could also be interesting to integrate within the covid case.
- However, Karen and her team are not that focused on children now because they are not highly affected by covid and the goal of Amsterdam is to keep the city as open as accessible for children as possible (i.e. schools).
- For loneliness and corona - it could be interesting because the city is very strict in closing physical and social interactions. But we still need to have basic interactions. How can these be organised in a safe way?
- Follow a qualitative / quantitative approach. Think first about the questions we want to address instead of start working with the data.
- Julia and Pinar can contact Karen in case they have more specific questions.
Interests / Potential applications / partners and people to involve:
- There is the rhythm research group and more studies can be derived from it. For instance, Alessandro is now working on two conversational agents: one learning about trust management and another conversational agent about mental health.
- Alessandro “we can definitely help with making the data more available”. We can do a lot regarding data about public spaces but the health data is very difficult to reach, therefore, we are interested in being part of this initiative.
- Alessandro and Achilleas group “Data integration and data enrichment is something we can also work on.
- Alessandro is concerned about the type of data they have Karen “data where people live. Brunel [female, Data and OIS], she is building a database about tests and corona cases. Who is infected, what they live, what the social status is, what they do?
- Risk and vulnerability indices. Where are the vulnerable people? How their presence and activity patterns are affected by something that is or could be of risk for them?. The next thing would be – risk maps for neighbourhoods and add vulnerability although “to map” vulnerability we need more aspects.
- Combination with the Social distance dashboard: Activity patterns based on locations. temporal patterns along the day, week. Determine base rhythms (street rhythms) and rhythms zones (look at the trash case from Pinar’s research).
- Use it as a communication tool but also to plan interventions.
- Ahti is doing some work about vulnerability maps - https://markdverhagen.shinyapps.io/COVID19_NL/. The data granularity for Amsterdam is at the wijk level already. More info about the dashboard here:https://ahti.nl/nieuws/nieuw-covid-19-dashboard-geeft-inzicht-in-risico-hotspots-op-hoge-zorgdruk-bij-tweede-golf/
- Michiel Heijdenrijk is the contact of Alessandro and Achilleas there.
- Mark Verhagen worked previously with Caroline and Pinar in the rhythms study. he is now based in oxford but is collaborating with ahti in the “vulnerability” dashboard: https://markdverhagen.shinyapps.io/COVID19_NL/ Mark took this concept from the UK and applied it to NL
- Possible collaboration or synchronization with the CTO department from Gemeente Amsterdam (Tamas Erkelens and Maarten Sukel)
Next steps practical steps:
- Caroline made an initial framework – Talking map – about who is already working on the subject. This will help to developing the questions and to understand who (which experts) they need for what.
- In this framework, rhythm is one of the elements, suggesting that all rules are towards control, which is hard for people to adapt. While with rhythm, this can be carried out in a more effortless way. The goal is to go from control to rhythm.
- 1st step is to plan a day for mapping exercise (reflection sessions on the mapping) before 29th of October 2020 (next conceptual city rhythms meeting). Caroline and Karen will organize that.
- Are we going to collaborate with ahti (considering the previous experience with them as well as their current involvement in the subject)?
- Deciding whether 0 hours contract or 1 day with the GGD.
- Deciding on the starting date: 1st of November, or 1st of December
Julia’s question for Karen:
- Which data is available / are you working with at the moment? number of infections? number of people with diabetes?
- What are the expectations of my role? making the “data accessible” in terms of developing the data infrastructure: define the metadata, infrastructure (DB’s), building a portal where people can access that data, building dashboards to make the data understandable and display basic statistics about it? In this last case, will there be anyone helping me out with the analyses or shall I do the analyses myself?