Dated 15th April 2020
1. Background
1.1 Following the outbreak of COVID-19, the parties listed at www.emergentalliance.org have initiated the formation of the Emergent Alliance.
1.2 The Emergent Alliance will be comprised of the parties listed above, future members seeking to join after the programme’s launch, and participants willing to accept and agree to the statement of shared intent and ways of working (see below) and together they will aim to use combined data to accelerate and smooth global economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis in a manner compliant with applicable laws and regulations and internal standards.
1.3 Membership of the Emergent Alliance is voluntary, with assets, activities and outcomes agreed to in writing by the parties being deemed to be pro bono and to be used for the common good without financial commitment or recovery.
2. Shared Intent
As Governments explore and shape plans to recover from the outbreak of COVID-19, the members and participants of the Emergent Alliance wish to work together, using the power of data to accelerate and smooth global economic recovery.
The two pillars of activity centre around the following challenges, although focus areas may expand:
- “Can a broad set of economic, behavioural and sentiment data, be fused together and analysed to provide new insights and practical applications to the global COVID-19 response, as well as the economy and its recovery?”
- “Can we use these models to identify lead indicators signalling economic recovery cycles that global businesses can use to build operating confidence in investment and activities that shorten or limit recessionary impacts?”
The Emergent Alliance will ask its members to publish challenge statements to the participant community, and to consider making agreed data-sets available to the public domain that can be used in combination with other contributions, to address these challenges. Participation in the subsequent work to address challenges comes from voluntary donations of time, expertise and capability from members of the public acting as private individual participant members.
The Emergent Alliance members will agree how data (including without limitation sensitive or closed data) will be shared over secure systems and infrastructure in accordance with industry standards. Data-science resources may be from academic members, contributing members’ own teams, or crowd-sourced participants managed and supported by convening partners.
Emergent Alliance contributors (members and participants) may identify, pipeline and publish/signpost relevant open-source data-sets that can be included.
3. Ways of Working
To participate, Emergent Alliance contributors (members and participants) may publish a challenge statement and identify a contributing data-set, and/or respond to an already published challenge statement with a contributing data-set or offer of data science resources or technical resources.
By agreeing to this statement of intent, Emergent Alliance members and participants signal their intention to join the Emergent Alliance, to comply with its shared intent and ways of working, and to agree to communicate their participation in public, including but not limited to websites, social media, news outlets and other public statements of endorsement.