Lockdown, quarantine, and isolation measures have been implemented across the globe to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and reduce the strain on medical infrastructure. Project Lockdown empowers citizens, journalists, and human rights workers to easily analyze the social and political effects of these measures. Inspired by the need for transparency and accountability, Project Lockdown is committed to providing citizens of the world with the tools they need to stay safe and informed.

Project Lockdown provides an overview of NPIs (Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions) undertaken by governments across the globe to assess the success of different pandemic response measures and monitor their impact on human and digital rights. The web and responsive mobile interface provides a clear overview of existing lockdowns, details per territory, and a time slider that allows the user to view the NPIs over time (past, present and future). The data is primarily sourced from official pronouncements from governments and maintains a neutral, unbiased stance.

Project Lockdown takes a meticulous approach to collecting and synthesizing data points in order to best serve users through transparency, accuracy, and reliability. We collect official government sources and measure a number of NPIs, including the affected time periods. We have an Editor’s platform to obtain and analyze sources in addition to codifying the data points. A back-end business logic calculates all the values for each data point over the days while information is pulled over by the client and rendered on screen.

Project Lockdown has faced several challenges as a born-digital initiative composed of volunteers spread across different continents. Organizing the team, structuring the communications and workflow, and working with open-access tools all required significant strategy. Additionally, defining the criteria for the data, territories, and related NPIs proved to be challenging.

With limited resources and a completely remote team formed in just a couple weeks, Project Lockdown has made significant progress towards a platform that has immense potential for impact. We fundamentally believe in the value this initiative can bring to a diverse range of users during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond. We’re proud to present the platform as a part of a collective pursuit to learn from these unprecedented times in an effort to make a positive change now, and prepare the world for the future.

The design and structure of the project is intended to be scalable for future use in other scenarios where an event with worldwide effects would need to be easily monitored and analyzed. The team at Project Lockdown is working to build the platform in a way that optimizes future adaptation and iterative flexibility.

Built With

• gas
• mapbox
• node.js
• preact
• python
• python-package-index