Interview
Building the world’s first great source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data | Max Roser (2021)
- Our World in Data expects to continue its exponential growth in public influence, with monthly traffic projected to reach or exceed 10 million users, driven by a fivefold increase during the pandemic and a strong search engine optimization focus that outperforms social media channels.
- The organization plans to launch "The World's Big Problems in Brief," a condensed series of key takeaways to make long-form research more accessible, aiming to serve existing global problem-solvers while attracting new audiences who lack direct access to data.
- Future infrastructure development includes building a content management system where research data automatically updates papers and visualizations, creating "living" databases for projects such as war deaths and mental health metrics, alongside a "poverty explorer" to clarify terminology.
- Strategic priorities for 2021 and beyond involve scaling vaccine production to address COVAX funding gaps, correcting data presentation errors to improve accuracy, and expanding into environmental and waste management data sectors.
- The organization anticipates a significant role in education and mental health, expecting psychologists to use their work to alleviate anxiety and plans to measure educational impact through comparative course studies, while also releasing corrected education data following a recent processing error.
- Financial sustainability relies heavily on unrestricted reader donations from approximately 3,500 to 4,000 individuals, alongside foundation support from entities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has provided the flexibility needed to expand the team to include new researchers and an operations officer.
- Growth challenges include the difficulty of maintaining data quality in poor countries, the risk of site crashes from traffic surges like "Reddit hugs of death," and the constraint of academic systems that fail to reward data maintenance and public communication.
- The team aims to bridge the gap between researchers and policymakers by ensuring their data is cited in government reports, noting that the UK government's data reporting has improved significantly while international bodies like the WHO require better data presentation to match national standards.
- Upcoming hires will focus on operations, finance, and research grants, with the organization moving past a period of financial instability to a stage of stability that allows for international, fully remote recruitment and the development of new career roles on their job board.
- Long-term expectations involve replacing static PDF publishing with dynamic HTML and automated data integration, correcting the current "museum" effect where only a fraction of 100,000 metrics are visible, and fostering a culture of citizen science for data aggregation.