Perhaps I should just wait for the webinar in 10 minutes, but I was just corresponding with @petyakangalova on the support desk re. the Covid-19 guidance.
Essentially, there’s obvious scalability and useability concerns with adding free text “Covid-19” to the title. It gets the discoverability job done, but potentially becomes noise in activity titles as more and more programming has to adapt to a changing world. If coronavirus becomes a seasonal but unvaccinated ongoing reality, will every activity in the world eventually be suffixed as “–Covid-19”?
I had some brief discussions about using <tag> for Covid-19, but obviously that requires a new codelist to be added/used, and the obvious codelists are already in use in <humanitarian-scope>
But that got me thinking: what exactly is Covid-19?
Sure, in it’s an emergency/appeal, and for a certain audience that’s sufficient. But for a more generalist (or even niche) data user/researcher, <tag> was meant to be the user-desired yet easy-on-publishers discoverability tool. Of course, that requires codelists to avoid the perils of free text.
So aside from disaster/response codelists already spoken for, what is Covid-19 that makes it interesting to said researcher: a cross-cutting issue? a particular methodology (i.e. remote monitoring, local decision-making, socially distanced programming)? an international topic of concern? (To be clear, these are all poor examples that don’t translate well to codelists).
I guess my question is: has anyone else considered alternatives for tracking and tagging Covid-19 data within their donor ecosystem? (I know you have, but I’ll refrain from calling you out:-)