We are incredibly proud of what CCI has accomplished over the past three years. Our COVID-19 research and the work we led through the Chelsea Project saved lives and developed a model for interdisciplinary collaborations that can be replicated in other contexts. We incubated several projects from infancy that will live on outside of CCI—we are excited to see how they continue to grow from here. 

At the same time, CCI brought together a community of thoughtful, smart, and compassionate people who were united by a common purpose: to solve big, complex problems. We want to express our deep gratitude to our funders, Board members, staff, and the hundreds of members of CCI’s community who contributed to these successes. We know that this community will continue the work that we’ve started together through other avenues.We are preserving all of CCI’s work at https://centerofci.org/projects/ and all of our publications at https://interventions.centerofci.org/. If you are interested in thinking about and solving complex problems, we invite you to take a look and help carry this important work forward.

CCI is excited to release its Impact Report for 2022. To name just a few highlights, in the past year, we started eight new collaborations, administered over 3,900 COVID tests in Chelsea, MA, and just launched an open-source database tool with over 1500 stars on GitHub.

Read the report to learn more about our health and climate research and our recent publications about the team’s COVID work in Chelsea.

Thank you to our community, funders, Board, and staff for a fantastic year! We’d love to hear from you if you are interested in getting involved or would like to learn more about our work!

Samantha Bates, Executive Director

The Center of Complex Interventions is excited to announce the public alpha launch of Mathesar: an open source database tool that lets anyone, of any technical skill level, organize and use data with ease. The Mathesar team is seeking software engineers as well as non-technical users to help test out the tool and offer feedback.

Mathesar makes it easy to organize information in the way that makes sense for you, and to collaborate on that information with others. Use Mathesar to create a customized database to plan events, track goals, manage inventory, or any other project you can think of. You’ll have a ready-made interface for data entry, as well as an intuitive way to build custom reports. 

Mathesar is designed to give users ownership, consistency, and flexibility with their data. Built on Postgres, the world’s most advanced open source database, Mathesar can be used on top of existing databases and integrated with most Postgres tools. By installing Mathesar on your own server you maintain control and privacy over your data, while the web-based interface offers easy collaboration and sharing with teams. With a user-friendly interface similar to a spreadsheet, Mathesar combines intuitive design with customizable functionality 

Check out a live demo of Mathesar here.

The Mathesar team is looking for a broad range of users to try out the tool and offer different perspectives. 

Getting started with Mathesar is easy:

1. Install Mathesar on your server and access the web interface
2. Connect to an existing database or build a new one, and start organizing and using your data.
3. Share your feedback on GitHub or email hello@mathesar.org

The Mathesar team will incorporate alpha testers’ feedback into regular updates to the software as we work towards our stable 1.0 release. Join our mailing list for updates about Mathesar and opportunities to test out further developments.

Interested in trying out Mathesar but not sure how to install it and get started? We’re happy to help! Click here to request a free installation.

Check it out here.

A new handbook from the Center of Complex Interventions is a practical guide for researchers, local governments, and community organizers on how to design an effective, coordinated strategy to overcome the challenges of a pandemic. The Covid-19 Intervention Manual draws on lessons and outcomes from CCI’s experience leading The Chelsea Project, a collaborative effort that included government entities, local nonprofits, and startups.

Chelsea, Massachusetts had one of the highest COVID-19 transmission rates in New England in the summer of 2020. The Chelsea Project was a coordinated effort to identify the key drivers of disease spread and change behaviors to improve public health. Using research, on-the-ground outreach, and local government resources, the Chelsea Project deployed wastewater analysis, targeted PCR testing and vaccine outreach, and a community-led communications strategy. By summer 2021, Chelsea had one of the highest vaccination rates among cities with comparable demographics in the U.S. 

The manual describes the complexity of COVID as a “wicked problem”—one that has no clear solutions and where all solutions seem to cause additional problems. It then details how CCI identified the key strategies to tackle this complex public health problem, built a diverse team, and learned from successes and failures. 

Included in this manual are practical, evidence-based recommendations for:

• Building and activating a diverse team
• Creating a weekly cycle of data gathering, implementation, and learning
• Working with partners
• Effecting change in a community

We worked with a marginalized city of immigrants, and turned it around from being the epicenter of the pandemic to one of the highest vaccination rates. I believe what we learned from the community and the trust we built together are cornerstones for solving other health disparities. This manual is the “how” for moving public health into the next decade 

Cristina Alonso, DrPH, MPH, CPM – Public Health Director and Lead Author

The Covid-19 Intervention Manual is available for free here. The CCI team will also have hard copies available at their table at the upcoming APHA 2022 Annual Meeting, November 6-9 in Boston, MA.

In June 2021 while over half of Chelsea residents had been vaccinated, we were observing numbers stagnating. We wanted to understand better who was delaying vaccination, why, and what we could do about it. With the results of this survey, we aimed to design messaging and programs that could address residents’ concerns and achieve higher rates of community immunity. We found that those who had not yet been vaccinated were under 30 years old, and were waiting to see if any negative impacts developed among those who were immunized. To learn more about who was delaying COVID vaccination and why look below.

By February 2022 Chelsea had reached a population vaccination rate of 89%. While most adult cohorts have adult vaccination rates of over 95%, children from 5-11 still had low uptake rates. On February 14, 2022, 54% of children had received the first dose and 31% had received a second dose.  In order to better understand barriers and concerns around vaccinating children, we conducted three focus groups with mothers of children ages 5-11 in February 2022. We learned that the majority of mothers had been vaccinated themselves and in general felt that they had made the correct decision. However, mothers were concerned about whether or not the vaccine had enough evidence to be deemed safe for young children. The majority of mothers stated that while they fully intend to vaccinate their children, they are waiting until they believe it is safe. To learn more about parents’ perceptions of childhood vaccination, look below.

A city of mostly low-wage Latinx immigrants, Chelsea is known for having overcrowded and substandard housing, high levels of poverty, and food insecurity. While the underlying social and economic realities of this community might have predicted a major catastrophe with the arrival of COVID in March of 2020, public health professionals and medical researchers were shocked when an exploratory study carried out in April found antibodies to COVID among 30% of Chelsea residents (Saltzman, 2020). By the week of June 10, 2020, Chelsea had recorded 2839 cumulative cases of COVID, at a rate of 7537 per 100,000 and a positivity rate of 38.14% which contrasted with the state positivity rate of 15% (Massachusetts Department of Public Health, 2020). These data showed that Chelsea had a COVID-19 rate almost six times higher than the state average and that many of those being tested were positive, an indication of both a high rate of disease as well as low rates of testing (Barry, 2020). 

To understand trends and frequencies among COVID cases, we carried out data analysis for the city from March through August 2020. Data analysis continued through March of 2021 to monitor trends in who was most likely to get COVID and what were their outcomes. You can learn more about positivity analysis for COVID in the early part of the pandemic below.

Following the positivity analysis, we developed a survey to understand the economic and psycho-social impacts of COVID-19 on Chelsea’s Latinx community. The target population was predominantly Latinx, low-wage workers who were likely impacted by job loss and other economic and social shocks due to the pandemic. The survey was administered through multiple means, including social media and email blasts sent to La Colaborativa members and followers, directly targeting individuals in the food and diaper pantry lines at La Colaborativa and by phone banking. Phone banking was conducted during October and the first week of November and was the most successful survey recruitment method. Learn about the impact of COVID on Chelsea residents below.

The results demonstrate that the impact and social response to COVID in Chelsea exacerbated existing vulnerabilities while activating and expanding its strengths. On the one hand, Chelsea was disproportionately impacted by COVID by having a higher rate of COVID cases, higher rates of unemployment, and higher reliance on social protection systems than other cities in Massachusetts. At the same time, Chelsea organized to meet the needs of its residents and reinforced a collective sense of belonging and purpose in a way that few other cities have replicated. Latinx values of family loyalty, community obligation, and an understanding that God is ultimately benevolent were among the attributes that were so notable and contributed to the community’s resilience. These inherent cultural strengths enabled the community to survive and should be highlighted in re-building a healthier, stronger Chelsea.

The Center of Complex Interventions is excited to welcome three contributors to the Mathesar project this summer as part of Google’s Summer of Code. Each contributor will be working on adding a specific feature to Mathesar under the guidance of 1-2 members of CCI’s Mathesar core team. 

Mathesar is an open source database project, currently in early development. Mathesar provides an intuitive user interface for non-technical users to work with relational databases without any existing knowledge of database concepts. Users can store, organize, and set up various views of their data. Users will also be able to collaborate with other users, see visualizations of their data, and evolve their data model as their needs change. Mathesar is designed to be self-hosted on users’ own servers. 

Over the next few months, our Summer of Code contributors will work with the team to get Mathesar ready for an alpha release. 

Meet our contributors

Yurii Palaida

Yurii Palaida is an alumnus of Binary Studio Academy, one of the best free online programming courses in Ukraine. Yurii works as a full-stack .NET developer and adores Python in his free time. Yurii also has experience as a mentor himself, working with students from the Academy after he graduated to build a state-of-the-art web application. In his free time, Yurii enjoys traveling with his wife, playing with their dog and cat, and reading about new topics like learning, evolution, and behaviorism. “I love learning and exploring. That’s why I applied to participate in the Google Summer of Code,” says Yurii. “I’m so happy to become a part of this community and consider it a first step into the world of open-source.”

Yurii will implement “dependency graph” functionality in Mathesar that will consist of API endpoints for querying dependents for specific database objects and a UI for displaying those in the form of visual graphs. 

Jinxiao Li

Jinxiao is a Master’s student at Carnegie Mellon University, majoring in Information Systems Management. With previous experience as a data scientist intern, she maintained database tables with millions of daily recordings, and understands the need to design a handy data management application. In her free time Jinxiao enjoys painting, reading detective stories, and traveling. “Developing a tool that can help people with their work will be a really fun thing to do in my life,” she says.

Jinxiao will implement support for working with JSON data in Mathesar. Her work will include automatic recognition of JSON during data import, changing a database field to a JSON object, data validation and support for custom grouping, filtering, and sorting operations.

Anish Umale

Anish Umale is a junior computer engineering student from India, where his focus is in backend and API development. He’s interested in exploring different areas, including blockchain, computer networks, and system design. In Anish’s free time he likes to read, watch live streams, and play video games, as well as swimming and kite flying. He says, “I am fascinated by the idea of open-source software which unknowingly I’ve been using my entire life and is used by millions of users worldwide for free! This inspired me to contribute to open-source software.”

Currently, Mathesar only supports creating a new table when data is imported. Anish aims to enhance the capability of Mathesar’s APIs and database code to support importing data into an existing table for a seamless user experience.

Mentorship and community

The Summer of Code program is focused on mentorship as well as coding and open source. Mentors will meet with mentees at least once a week and stay in touch via chat daily. They’ll answer questions, review code, help mentees when stuck, and generally do whatever it takes to help the mentees complete their project on time. Yurii, Jinxiao, and Anish will learn what it’s like to work with a professional engineering team, work on an open source project, and improve both technical and non-technical skills.

“We’re so thrilled to have these three talented young professionals on our team this summer, and we’re excited to share our community with them as well as our ethos of open source,” says project lead Kriti Godey, director of technology for CCI. “By the end of the program, we expect to see their projects become part of the main Mathesar codebase and available to Mathesar users.”

Mathesar, an open source database project from the Center of Complex Interventions (CCI), has been selected as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2022. The Mathesar team is seeking contributors with Python, JavaScript, or PostgreSQL skills to work on the project. Contributors will solve interesting technical challenges, acquire new skills, and learn what it’s like to work with a team on an open source project. See our Applicant Guide and Project Ideas page for how to get started.

Mathesar aims to make databases accessible to non-technical users, allowing users to store, manipulate, visualize, and collaborate with others on their data. It’s currently in early development, with the goal of releasing our first alpha version in mid-2022. Learn more about Mathesar, including some of the different types of contributions we’re looking for, on the Mathesar wiki. 

“We’re excited to grow the open source community by mentoring people new to open source,” says project lead Kriti Godey, director of technology for CCI. “This is a wonderful opportunity for us to spread the word about Mathesar and recruit community contributors. Although this is Mathesar’s first time participating in GSoC, the team has experience with mentoring GSoC contributors from previous organizations. We’re looking forward to developing relationships with people with all kinds of different backgrounds who are enthusiastic about the importance of open source software. ”

Google’s Summer of Code program pairs mentor organizations with contributors who are new to open source software. Contributors receive a stipend for the 12-week program with their mentor organization, which includes a 3-week community building and project introduction period, coding sprints, hands-on mentoring, and two-way evaluations. 

This year for the first time Google is accepting applications from anyone new to open source, rather than limiting the program to post-secondary students as in past years. The Mathesar team is interested in hearing from anyone who’s eager to learn and cares about making data, and databases, accessible and useful to all. 

Although contributor applications for Summer of Code open on April 4, interested contributors should read through our Applicant Guide and start discussing projects with mentors as soon as possible.

To kick off 2022, CCI has released an Impact Report to capture all that we’ve accomplished since we started the organization in the spring of 2020. Some of the biggest highlights from the past year and a half include a peer-reviewed paper in PLOS about the importance of wearing masks to reduce COVID infection risk; The Chelsea Project, which just launched a COVID rapid testing study to test seniors and people with disabilities in Chelsea and was prominently featured on NPR, and an open-source tool that visualizes ongoing work in climate change research that will soon be publicly available. We are extremely proud of our researchers, projects, and community. 

If you are interested in getting involved or would like to learn more about our work, we’d love to hear from you!

Samantha Bates, Executive Director