#OpenDataSavesLives & the COVID-19 crisis

ODI Leeds was founded in 2013 with the purpose of innovating with open data to help people and improve lives. As a Pioneer Node of the Open Data Institute, we bring communities together, host events, produce open data projects, and help promote the understanding and use of open data. You can see what we're all about via our website at https://odileeds.org

Since 2014, Munro House has been our home, where our beautiful, naturally-lit innovation space can be hired for events, unconferences, hackathons, etc. We are a small and spirited team, and we accomplish a lot with not a lot. We are a not-for-profit organisation, so any profits are always invested back into the work we do. Like so many other small and independent organisations, we've felt the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. With no innovation space and no events, all of our efforts are concentrated on data projects.

From the very start of the lockdown, we knew it would be important to unite people and help them collaborate with each other in any and all projects that sought to tackle the challenges brought on by the coronavirus crisis. We had already started a stream of work called #OpenDataSavesLives (because we think it really can!) so the focus for the coming weeks was to start pulling together sources of data, finding out what people need for their projects, making connections so that projects become richer rather than repetitive. https://odileeds.org/covid19

All profits from the sale of these t-shirts will help fund our work so that we can continue hosting online collaboration sessions, creating data visualisations, and advocating for open data so that we can all help shape the post-pandemic world.