Civic-Tech and Volunteered Geographic Information under the

COVID-19 Pandemic: A Japanese Case Study

Koshiro Suzuki

Faculty of Humanities, University of Toyama, 3190 Gofuku, Toyama, Japan

Keywords: COVID-19, Participatory GIS, Volunteered Geographic Information.

Abstract: In the early spring of 2020, a new infectious disease, COVID-19, emerged and spread globally, showing how

vulnerable humans are to novel viral threats. Evidently, this crisis has inspired new technological and social

innovations. The aim of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the application of civic tech and

volunteered geographic information to confront the disease, which spontaneously emerged after the first case

was confirmed in Japan in late January 2020. The trend of participatory Geographic Information

Systems/PGIS that emerged from the GIS controversy in the 1990s went through crisis mapping and has

demonstrated a new way of using GIS via social participation in the 21st century.

1 INTRODUCTION

The year 2020 will be considered as the year in which

the world fought the first pandemic to occur in 100

years. This highly infectious disease, COVID-19, has

shown how vulnerable human society is to novel viral

threats. Taubenberger and Morens (2006) reported

the spread of Spanish flu in the UK during the 1918

pandemic, and according to their study, it is likely that

the current pandemic will last for at least another

year, and we expect at least three waves of infections.

This paper was written in December 2020, when the

scale of the third wave had already exceeded that of

the second wave in Japan, and this persuades us to

reflect on the fact that our initial outlook was

extremely optimistic.

The work of Pyle (1986) provides fundamental

knowledge about the spread of an infection. Pyle

compared the processes by which influenza

pandemics spread over a period of approximately 100

years and found that the pandemic in 1791 took seven

months to reach Spain after invaded Europe from

Russia, whereas that of 1889 reached Spain in just

three months. One of the major events that had

occurred during this latter time was the improvement

of railways. The world's first railway line was built in

England in 1825, and railways were then built in

France in 1832 and in Germany in 1835 (Baxter 1866;

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1106-3798

Kobayashi and Cotte 1997; Ebeling 2005). Pyle's

research shows that the spread of disease has an

unquestionable relationship with the changes and

developments in transportation modes, via which

humans act as virus carriers.

In the case of COVID-19, the peak of infection

spreading within China (where the virus is believed

to have originated) was in early February 2020, and it

is believed that this occurred in relation to people

moving around the country during the Chinese New

Year holidays from 24 January (Zhou et al. 2020).

In Japan, four Chinese people who visited Japan

from Wuhan from 16 to 26 January developed the

disease sequentially, and the first Japanese person

was infected on 28 January (Shigemura et al. 2020).

This occurred just prior to the docking of the

Diamond Princess (a luxury cruise ship suspected of

carrying many positive patients) in Yokohama Port

on 3 February (Gallego et al. 2020). To establish a

better understanding of the Japanese situation in the

context of this paper, I would like to recall that at this

time, Japan considered that the initial spark of the

COVID-19 outbreak would have no direct

repercussions for Japan. This course of time fulfils the

role of understanding the context of this study.

Incidentally, approximately 100 years ago (on 17

November 1910), an advert appeared in the St. Louis

Post, a local newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri, in the

United States. The advert was placed by the Bell

214

Suzuki, K.

Civic-Tech and Volunteered Geographic Information under the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Japanese Case Study.

DOI: 10.5220/0010467502140221

In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management (GISTAM 2021), pages 214-221

ISBN: 978-989-758-503-6

Figure 1: Newspaper advertisement placed by Bell

Telephone Company approximately 100 years ago (source

is indicated in the body text).

Telephone Company, which originated in Boston in

1877, and it was captioned ‘When in Quarantine’.

The caption was then accompanied by a short

description summarising the implications of the

caption: ‘PEOPLE who are in quarantine are not

isolated if they have a Bell Telephone’ (Fig. 1).

This advert suggests that at the dawn of the last

century, the desire played a significant role in the

spread of this new technology and its associated

demand, because it is targeted at patients in isolation

who need to communicate with the outside world.

The theme I of this paper is symbolically depicted

in this advertisement; in other words, ‘disaster

promotes technological innovation’. Social crises

such as wars, illnesses, and disasters provide major

opportunities for the development of technological

innovations. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to

review the social peril induced by COVID-19 in

Japan 2020 from the perspective of epidemic

prevention activities achieved through citizen

participation in a ‘participatory GIS context’.

2 SOCIAL PARTICIPATION OF

CITIZENS

2.1 What Is Volunteered Geographic

Information?

The internet is the main infrastructure in today’s

information society, and its roots lie in a network

system of academic institutions by packet

communications developed in the late 1960s by

funding from the U.S. Department of Defense’s

Advanced Research Project Agency (Abbate 1994).

Similarly, the development of the geographic

positioning system (GPS), the core technology that

supports today's car navigation systems and

autonomous driving technologies, developed from

precision guidance technology introduced to combat

during the Gulf War (Daly 1993). Other fundamental

technology, such as that of infrared photography,

which forms the basis of remote sensing technology,

has its roots in film that can visualise the infrared

band, which was developed by Kodak during WW2

in 1943. These infrared and ultraviolet night-vision

techniques made it possible to identify obscured

firearms and military installations from the sky

(Monmonier 2002a). Aerial photography, the use of

which will be discussed later in this paper as a life-

saving entity, is no exception. In 1936, the

Agricultural Adjustment Administration began taking

aerial photographs of farmland for using in soil

surveys and demarcation, and by 1941, more than

90% of farmland in the United States (U.S.) had been

photographed (Monmonier 2002b). Shortly

afterwards, aerial photographs were used together

with latitude and longitude coordinates and

topographic maps in Japanese urban air raids at the

end of the Pacific War, which showed that they were

highly effective for enabling horizontal bombing

from the sky (United States Army Air (Forces 1944)).

Based on the bitter lessons learned from the Great

Hanshin–Awaji Earthquake (1995), Japan has

promoted the digitisation of land information. Today,

various statistical data and numerical maps (digitised

geographic information, such as prefectural

boundaries, railways, roads, rivers, and elevations)

can be accessed free of charge on the websites of the

National Geographic Institute and the Statistics

Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and

Communications, which makes them easy to use on

personal computers and mobile devices (Sato and

Une 2020).

In 2011, 16 years after the Great Hanshin–Awaji

Earthquake, crisis mapping was conducted during the

Civic-Tech and Volunteered Geographic Information under the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Japanese Case Study

215

first restoration stage immediately following the

Great East Japan Earthquake. In a situation where it

was not possible to determine what was happening in

the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the only clues

were obtained from the photos taken by satellites in

real time and aerial photographs taken by aircraft. It

was thus essential to read and digitise these to

understand the information relating to roads in coastal

areas and to associate it with digital maps on the web,

and then to enable its sharing so that Self-Defense

Forces and rescue teams could access entrance routes

as quickly as possible. A platform was therefore built

and used during the Great East Japan Earthquake

(Seto 2011), wherein bitter lessons learned following

the Great Hanshin–Awaji Earthquake were put into

practice.

At this time, the Japanese version of crisis

mapping became a copyright-free web map called

Open Street Map (OSM), which was created in 2004,

and a website (sinsai.info) used map built-in

technology called GeoAPI to operate OSM. All these

were created by the general public in a collaborative

spirit, and not by government officials nor

researchers. Although participatory GIS has been

rapidly accepted since the beginning of the 21st

century, it was the first instance in Japan where social

participation by citizens through mapping, namely

participatory GIS, achieved concrete and remarkable

results for the first time and resulted in the

democratisation of mapping (Seki 2011).

In the 2000s, the bi-directionalisation of web

communication (Web 2.0) advanced rapidly against

the background of faster web communication and

higher performance computing devices. Michael

Goodchild of the University of California (UCSB)

coined the phrase, ‘volunteered geographic

information (VGI)’ in relation to the arrival of an era

in which geographic information can be mapped in

both directions from anywhere in the world by

anybody, provided they have certain skills and the

available infrastructure (Goodchild 2007).

2.2 Code for Project

It is welcomed to have knowledge about computer

programming when participating in providing VGI.

Social participation through mapping can be achieved

by people having skills necessary to design a

platform, who are willing to play a central role in the

VGI project. In other words, VGI is supported by the

general public (including engineers and

programmers), who write programmes and codes to

design the site, and by end-users, who modify and

correct the wording on electronic maps and websites.

This successful combination enables people to

participate in solving social issues. One of the key

movements was the Code for Project (CfP), which

was founded in the United States in 2004 as a Code

for America. The main leader is Jennifer Pahlka, who

is also the partner of Web 2.0, advocating Tim

O'Reilly. CfP was also introduced in Japan, and the

code for Japan was established in 2013 via the

achievements made through the Japanese version of

the crisis mapping mentioned earlier. It is no

coincidence that the founder of the Code for Japan

was Hiroyuki Seki, a system engineer who built the

website, sinsai.info. Various mobile applications

have subsequently been created from Japanese CfP on

occasions where it is not possible for local

government to focus on providing information. For

instance, the Code for Kanazawa developed an

application named ‘5374.jp’ by identifying users’

residences from information about their GPS location

through a mobile phone and linking them with

garbage disposal dates provided by the local

government. The application then automatically

informs you about the type of garbage that can be put

out every day (Takeda 2014). Similarly, the Code for

Tokushima published an application known as ‘Ren-

radar’ that informed users of the real time locations of

Ren, a team of dancers, during the Awa-Odori festival

(Code for Tokushima 2015).

In summary, an open data trend was developed

in Japan after the Great Hanshin–Awaji Earthquake,

and the trend of civic-tech citizens actively

participating in society through programmes and data

editing was established prior to the emergence of the

current social peril, COVID-19.

2.3 Visualising Infectious Diseases with

VGI

One of the countermeasures that can be employed in

tackling COVID-19 is to use electronic maps and

diagrams that can be shared to gain a better

understanding of the status and process of

transmission of infection, in the same way as we use

maps when lost. In fact, this has become the front-

line attack for VGI vs. COVID-19.

In this respect, the most famous visualisation site

globally as of December 2020 is the website ‘Covid-

19 Dashboard (DB)’ created by The Center for

Systems Science and Engineering, Johns Hopkins

(JH) University.

A DB is a set of visualisation tools on the web that

look like an administration screen. It allows users to

adjust values and output results by clicking or

pressing buttons relating to data, figures, and charts.

GISTAM 2021 - 7th International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management

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Figure 2: Dashboard screenshot of COVID-19 Japan. (Retrieved on 30 December. 2020 from; https://www.stopcovid19.jp/).

A DB does not analyse anything from a

professional point of view. It is a public instrument

that can be used to effectively visualise and

understand the current situation as accurately as

possible.

The earliest example of a visualisation website

was launched by a Japanese newspaper company,

Nihon Keizai Shimbun Co., Ltd., on 7 February, who

aimed to visualise the COVID-19 spread using

graphic charts. Subsequently, Takuma Ohamazaki, a

representative of an election consulting firm,

launched the DB entitled ‘Map of the Number of

Infected People’ on 16 February. In this respect, the

company aimed to visualise the disease by adding its

own expressions, such as a kernel density map, with

technical support from the ArcGIS dashboard, while

referring to the DB design of JH University.

On 27 February, another newspaper company,

Toyo Keizai Shimbun, published a DB that visualises

the progress of domestic infection. There are two

notable points relating to this DB: the author (Kazuki

Ogihara) worked for the company's editorial

department individually planned and created the DB,

and he used a data vault on the web called GitHub on

the visualisation site as far as being found.

GitHub opens the source code of the user’s

programme so that volunteers can request, point out,

and respond to bugs in real time. As a result, sections

can contain errors, and their revision statuses and the

content of the conversation during the revisions are

also visible. This DB subsequently received a good

design Award 2020 in October.

This trend became firmly established when the

Tokyo metropolitan government, under the technical

support of the Code for Japan, released the official

‘New Coronavirus Countermeasure Site’ on GitHub

on 4 March and took further measures to enable

perfecting it using collective knowledge by applying

an open-source code under a common licence that

permits its reproduction and distribution for non-

commercial purposes. It was also selected for the

Good Design Best 100 award in 2020. In fact,

Hokkaido, which was suffering from the spread of

infection, employed a Hokkaido version of the Tokyo

Civic-Tech and Volunteered Geographic Information under the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Japanese Case Study

217

Figure 3: Dashboard screenshot of COVID-19 live. (Retrieved on Dec. 30. 2020 from; https://covid-2019.live/).

metropolitan government site created under the name

of ‘#JUSTDoIT’, and a similar movement spread to

Kanagawa and other prefectures. In addition, large

information technology corporations such as ESRI

Japan and Yahoo also created the COVID-19

visualisation websites using open data.

A participant in a VGI renders a social

contribution based around their time limits and ability

and without expecting anything in return. In Japan,

during 2020, the VGI movement also occurred on an

individual level with based on this conviction.

The first DB relating to COVID-19 was created on

8 March by an anonymous person known as

‘Kenmonezumi’. As the data formats and methods of

publication for each prefecture were not uniform and

the number of PCR tests and the positive test rates were

published in PDF format, he manually converted these

to CSV via text and published them using Google's

data portal. Although it is not a visualisation site using

a map, his DB is an example of an individual's first

attempt to visualise data related to COVID-19.

Taisuke Fukuno, representative of the Code for

Sabae and president of a venture company based in

Sabae City, Fukui Prefecture, also charted the

occupancy rates of hospital beds by prefecture in late

March, and this enabled the visualisation of the risk

of the health system collapsing (Fig. 2). This website

was viewed more than a million times in one month

from late March (Mainichi Shimbun, 29 April 2020).

Another noteworthy aspect of VGI that has

occurred during the epidemic is that foreigners living

in Japan, who tend to be considered socially

vulnerable, have made social contributions through

VGI. On 23 February, Dong-Yeon Lee, a student

from South Korea studying at Kyushu University,

created the ‘Novel Coronavirus Case Map’, which

shows infected people in red, people whose migration

history is known in blue, and people who have been

cured in green, as well as a streamline map of

migration history by city, ward, and town (the map

has not been updated since 30 October 2020). In

addition, covid19.live was launched on 3 March by

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Wei_Su, a Chinese international student, and this

visualises transitions between the infection density

and status by prefecture (Fig. 3). Such a movement

is in accordance with the Sustainable Development

Goals/SDGs philosophy of ‘ensure responsive,

inclusive, participatory, and representative decision-

making at all levels (Goal 16-7)’ and ‘ensure public

access to information and protect fundamental

freedom, in accordance with national legislation and

international agreements (Goal 16-10)’ (United

Nations 2020). It is remarkable that active

participation of people, who are in a socially

vulnerable position during an emergency, occurred

via mapping.

3 VGI POSSIBILITIES AND

CHALLENGES

As Dekker (2008) noted, ‘a prerequisite for partaking

in civil society is commitment, the willingness to bind

oneself to a common course and to take

responsibilities.’ In the sense of ‘social organisation,

such as trust, norms, and networks, that can improve

the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated

actions’ (Putnam et al. 1993: 167), the current VGI

movement can be characterised as being a typical

social capital. Symbolically, they complained about the

lack of usability and inconsistent formats of relevant

information released by local and national govern-

ments resulting from top-down management. Notably,

the COVID-19 disaster has shown how vulnerable the

hierarchical (top-down) decision-making system is in

the face of a rapidly advancing crisis.

Goodchild (2007), who foreshadowed the

promising future of VGI, referred to ethical issues in

his article, such as the accuracy of information

created and the digital divide. In this respect, ethical

issues relating to VGI that have been progressed

under the present COVID-19 disaster should be

mentioned.

COCOA, the contact verification application

released by the Ministry of Health, Labor, and

Welfare on 19 June was developed based on COVID-

19 Radar, a volunteer open-source project led by

Kazumi Hirose, a Microsoft Japan employee. On 8

May, the initiative to develop the application, which

had been promoted on a well-intentioned basis, was

taken up by the Ministry of Health, Labour, and

Welfare and contractors after their decision to use it.

However, it was later discovered that when Bluetooth

access was disabled, the device would not launch on

the iOS. This was severely criticised, and the

development was halted. Mr. Hirose, the developer of

COCOA, revealed on twitter that he had only three

weeks to make changes to the system at the time of

the transfer. The COCOA case thus exposed the

ethical issue of the extent of qualitative responsibility

the donor should take for contributions from

volunteers.

Another ethical issue relates to the spread of

malice during social crises. Fan et al. (2020) extracted

3,457,402 tweets about COVID-19 and China from

twitter API using query ‘china + and + coronavirus’

and showed that 25,467 of these involved hate

speech, which was highly related to the users’ poverty

and unemployment status and feeling of fear. The

analysis used the U.S. as a case study and also showed

that an upward trend in hate speech occurred when

the first COVID-19 cases in the U.S. were reported

and then immediately after the spread of the disease

was in full swing (which was evidenced by a report

from the Asia Pacific Policy Planning Council, which

found that 1,497 cases were reported in the U.S.

between 19 March and 15 April (Jeung and Nham

2020)).

Since the second wave of COVID-19 hit in

October 2020, messages encouraging the exclusion of

Asians have spread on social networking sites in

France, accelerating the division of society. For

example, one tweet said ‘Arabs and blacks living in

the 91

, 92

, 93

, 94

, and 95

arrondissements of

Paris, please attack Chinese people if you see them on

the street’ (Fig. 4). When people perceive that they

Figure 4: Tweet calling for Chinese assault.

Retrieved on 29 December 2020 from;

https://twitter.com/ruiwangfrance/status/13216083752983

79777/photo/2.

Civic-Tech and Volunteered Geographic Information under the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Japanese Case Study

219

are protected by anonymity, they are less likely to

exercise the same psychological restraint as when

they are not anonymous. Suler (2004) called this the

‘online disinhibition effect’. The problem, as the

tweet suggests, is that threats in virtual space can be

projected into real space by virtue of their location

(Suzuki 2021).

Velásquez et al. (2020) investigated the spread of

malicious content on social media using machine

learning to identify COVID-19-related hate speech,

false information, and misinformation. They revealed

that malicious content starting at 4ch spread to other

social networking sites (SNSs) (such as Telegram,

Gab, and Facebook) while forming network clusters.

At present, the right to delete such malicious content

is limited to the operating company of each SNS, and

it is extremely difficult to prevent it from spreading

over SNSs. The EU's ratification of a voluntary code

of conduct relating to hate speech in 2016 has not

been effective. France is in the midst of developing a

new law, the Avia Act (The Cube 2020) that regulates

online hate speech, and in the U.S. there is a fierce

battle over whether or not Section 230 of the

Communications Decency Act (CDA), which has

long held the view that social network operators are

not legally responsible for the content of their posts,

should be upheld (Musil 2020; Sink et al. 2020).

Due to the characteristics of social networking

tools, cyberspace sometimes becomes a stage for

information warfare between nations and ethnic

groups. As it was strongly suspected that COVID-19

originated in Wuhan, China, a conflict arose between

the U.S., who claimed it should be called the ‘Wuhan

virus,’ and the Chinese, who objected and claimed

that it had been imported from the U.S. Wang et al.

(2020) tracked Chinese #USAVirus propaganda

retweets from 1,256 twitter accounts and analysed

3,567 tweets collected before they were banned by

twitter on 12 June 2020. As a result, while many were

written in English, 74% of them held attached image

files of long sentences written in simplified Chinese

letters, and the posting time distribution was also

confirmed to relate to Chinese working hours. Wang

et al.’s report is reminiscent of the ‘A Study in

Empire’ made by opportunist scholars being

obsequent to Nazi imperialism (Monmonier 1991). It

is also possible to look at these logs on SNSs from the

viewpoint of historical material criticism.

In the French case I mentioned earlier, the hashtag

‘#JeNeSuisPasUnVirus’ was also spread in response

to hate speeches against Chinese people. Social

networking is only a tool, and it is people who use it.

However, among research fields dealing with

geographic information, limited research relating to

information ethics on the user side has been

conducted. At present, VGI, where engineers build

the platform, has only been minimally affected by

unethical behaviour that frequently occurs on SNSs.

However, it is also true that VGI, which leverages the

same collective knowledge as Wikipedia, is

constantly exposed to the risk of vandalism,

destruction, and data inaccuracy (Viégas et al. 2004).

4 REMARKS

In 100 years from now, when people recall the

COVID-19 pandemic, it will be apparent that for the

first time in human history, ordinary citizens assisted

in fighting the spread of disease by visualising

geographical information.

In addition, this disease has spread (via SNSs)

hate speech, propaganda, and rumours, and exposed

the dark side of humanity. In this age of readily

available pandemic information and the presence of

COVID-19, people are getting more capable of

delivering geographic information. In this age of

rapid spread of geographic information through

citizen participation, we thus need to also focus on the

associated ambivalent aspects.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study was supported by grants from KAKENHI

(Grant number 20K01173). I would like to express

my gratitude to Koji Ohnishi, Professor at the

University of Toyama, for his advice while preparing

the earlier draft. This paper was conceived based on

the content of a presentation given at the University

of Toyama's Collegium for the Humanities held on 16

December 2020.

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