This is a periodic newsletter of the interesting things we’ve seen and what we are thinking about in open source policy analysis.

Visualizing the coronavirus outbreak. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) have created an interactive dashboard to track the spread of the coronavirus outbreak in real time. Updated every 15 minutes, the dashboard maps cases, deaths, and recoveries at the province level in China; city level in the US, Australia, and Canada; and country level otherwise. The dashboard is designed for researchers, public health authorities, and the general public to easily track the virus’ spread, geography, and lethality. Link

Collecting the data for the coronavirus dashboard. To be able to display real-time results, the JHU researchers collect data from a range of sources, including an online platform run by members of the Chinese medical community called DXY, governmental organizations around the world, and the World Health Organization. The JHU team has open sourced both the coronavirus data and the mapping data used to create the dashboard for others to analyze. Link and link

Creators of PCI-China introduce PCI-Crackdown. In new Mercatus Center working paper, Julian TszKin Chan (Bates White Economic Consulting) and Weifeng Zhong (Mercatus Center) introduce a new open-source project to predict the Chinese government’s reaction to the Hong Kong protests. PCI-Crackdown, which is built with the PCI-China* framework, uses machine learning to “read” articles from the People’s Daily and compares their rhetoric to articles published leading up to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Link

PCI projects presented at State Department. To learn more about PCI-China and PCI-Crackdown, check out the slides that Weifeng Zhong presented recently during a symposium at the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. Link

A digital library for open-access textbooks. Soaring costs of textbooks have led the average college student in the US to spend over $1,000 per year on books and supplies. To combat these rising costs, the Open Textbook Library, created by the Center for Open Education at the University of Minnesota, offers free digital versions of openly licensed textbooks. Today, the library holds nearly 700 digital textbooks across dozens of disciplines and is continuing to expand. Link

* These projects are attendees or graduates of OSPC’s incubator program.

Edited by Matt Jensen and Peter Metz