Australia Dev in a Weekend Builds Better Covid Booking System Than Entire Gov

10 points by cefthurston 4y ago ↗ HN

Full credit to Fraser Hemphill who built covidqueue.com which makes it way easier to find COVID vaccination appointments than anything the government of Australia has built.

The site: covidqueue.com Video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm6oA2bNGdA

He built it in a weekend, too.

I love how concisely it shows the leverage of technology in the hands of smart folks who want to build useful things for society.

There's a donate button, but it does make me wonder about incentive alignment. Wouldn't it be awesome if there were prizes or grants given out by a foundation of sorts so that there's some more incentive for programmers to build these weekend projects.

Many do already, of course, because great programmers enjoy the challenge and process.

But it mainly made me think about how you could potentially align incentives to increase these leverage points.

It made me think this could fall into YC's mission.

This guy helped me find an appointment one month sooner than I otherwise would. At scale, he's likely saving lives, and unlocking a lot more economic benefits if this speeds up vaccination and leads Australia out of lockdown sooner.

Also, it's an incredible advertisement for school aged children on the power of technology to make the world better.

So I'm curious HN: do you think there's a good way to incentivize and reward folks who, in a weekend, can create things that make a massive difference to society? Especially for problems that are unlikely to make sense as a business.

4 comments

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[deleted] 4y ago ↗

(comment deleted)

muzani 4y ago ↗

This is exactly what hackathons try to do. It doesn't really work because the best incentive is internal. Governments have plenty of external incentives, but that's just not as good as skilled person with enough drive and a weekend.

karmakaze 4y ago ↗

> This is exactly what hackathons try to do. It doesn't really work because the best incentive is internal.

I agree that the best incentive is internal, but wasn't following that hackathons don't work, as I find them tremendous, where space is made for unusual work to be done. Especially awesome if that environment and time is made by your employer.

Then I realized that the 'it' which doesn't work are the prize incentives, etc. This was also found to be true in hackathons I've participated in, where there was a trend toward more effort being put into the presentation of the work rather than the work itself. Upon recognizing the pattern, the formula was changed without placements/prizes, but that seems too far the other way as good work still should be recognized and shared in some way.