The COVID-19 pandemic is a global challenge, and the key to tackling it is vaccinating a specified percentage of the population to acquire herd immunity. The observed problems with the efficiency of the vaccination campaigns in numerous countries around the world, as well as the approach used at the initial stage of the National Immunization Program in Poland, prompted us to analyse the possibility of using GIS technology to optimize the distribution of vaccines to vaccination sites so as to minimize the period needed to vaccinate individual population groups. The research work was carried out on the example of Warsaw, the capital of Poland and the city with the largest population in the country. The analyses were carried out for the 60–70 and 50–60 age groups, in various approaches and for vaccines of different companies (Moderna, BioNTech, AstraZeneca), used to vaccinate people in Poland. The proposed approach to optimize vaccine distribution uses Thiessen’s tessellation to obtain information on the number of people in a given population group living in the area of each vaccination site, and then to estimate the time needed to vaccinate that group. Compared to the originally used vaccination scenario with limited availability of vaccines, the proposed approach allows practitioners to design fast and efficient distribution scenarios. With the developed methodology, we demonstrated ways to achieve uniform vaccination coverage throughout the city. We anticipate that the proposed approach can be easily automated and broadly applied to various urban settings.

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A city should be planned to provide an appropriate amount and quality of public spaces, services, and mobility for any life activity. For citizens to be actively involved in improving the quality of the space around them and thus participate in shaping the place they live in, they need knowledge about the city and its strengths and weaknesses. They need access to data about the city in an easy-to-use and interpretable form through specific tools. An example is indicators, which present data about the city in different categories important for city development. Excellent tools for transferring information between a city and its citizens are new web-based solutions such as dashboards. This article reviews selected dashboards in terms of their thematic scope, the number of indicators presented, data sources and tools for data analysis and visualization. In the discussion, the main problems related to data publication, analytical tools and cartographic presentation are identified. The recommendations propose two dashboard models: simple and complex, depending on the purpose and needs of the user. Comparing the values of indicators in different areas of the city can contribute to increased active participation of residents and their involvement in decision making about their surroundings. A review of dashboards showed little use of the potential of IT and geo-analytical tools in building a real dialog with residents.

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