Cristina Vrinceanu
Cristina Vrinceanu is a member of the geo-spatial.org community (OSGeo Romania Chapter) and a Charter member of OSGeo since 2019. She is a postgraduate researcher with the University of Nottingham, where she uses satellite imagery to map natural offshore hydrocarbon pollution.
Sessions
In this talk, we aim to present the geo-spatial.org community efforts of visualizing the geospatial spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Romania since its beginning in March 2020 until the present time.
Geo-spatial.org’s Covid-19 app, built entirely on FOSS, delivers correct, complete and updated official information on the virus spread in Romania.
Our platform contains several maps and graphs depicting the different dimensions of the pandemic in Romania, ranging from confirmed cases/deaths/healed patients and related statistics, to hospital infrastructure, quarantine zones to pollution/mobility indexes, as well as other impact indicators of this epidemic in our country. Unfortunately, the Romanian authorities have failed in communicating the evolution of the COVID-19, resulting in numerous glitches in different reports. Thus, we have been volunteering our time to collect detailed information from the local/national media, compare it to the official reporting, sort it and deliver it in a structured manner.
One year in the pandemic and the situation has not improved. With a notable, but a too limited exception, the Romanian authorities have not changed their opaque policy of interacting with the community. Thus, the COVID-19 geo-spatial.org team has continued to support the data mapping efforts and the open data community.
The application is built using Node.js, PostgreSQL+PostGIS, R on the backend and OpenLayers, Angular, charts.js, Plotly and D3.js for the frontend. The source code is on GitHub [https://github.com/geospatialorg/covid19], MIT licensed. The infrastructure is supported by Sage Group [http://www.sage.ieat.ro/] on AWS and by Carto.
The event will be split in two. The first half will be women and non binary people (nb) only. Then everyone is invited to join. This helps the inclusivity and network building among women and nb.
The session highlights the different aspects related to equality and diversity in FOSS4G.
In the past years, women+ groups, including Women in Geospatial+, have amassed members from all over the globe, as well as from all backgrounds in the geospatial field. Through our work, we noticed increased interest in participation in the geospatial field, necessity for mentorship and being mentored, proactivity and a keen desire to learn and have access to skills and opportunities that were not being easily available to women so far. Through our work and the work of other sister organisations (e.g Geochicas, African Women in GIS, Ladies of Landsat, Sisters of SAR, GeoLatinas), we could determine that while the trend for equality and diversity in the field is a positive one, albeit slow, there is an imbalanced involvement in open source component of the geospatial field, with less women+ representatives overall.