[FRIAM] I am accepting wagers

[Barry MacKichan]

When the healthcare.gov fiasco was going on, I was trying repeatedly to refill my Starbucks card using their web site. I thought it would be interesting to see which site would be running correctly first. I don’t know which was first but it was close — it wasn’t a slam dunk win for private enterprise over government.

I remember when building an online store with a shopping cart was a big deal in the ‘90s. Now building these sites is like playing with tinker toys.

I can see a lot more work needed that will never be seen from the public’s side of the system. The 50,000 sites will not be constant. Some new ones will come, and some will go. Hospitals, public health departments, independent as well as chain pharmacies have to feed information into the system. How do they pass that information?  How do they prove they are not a hacker and have the authority to change hours, capacity, availability of vaccine, location, etc. Are there mechanisms for weeding out defunct and out-of-date vaccination sites? The problems getting up-to-date and accurate numbers for COVID tests, deaths, ICU usage, etc., demonstrate this is not trivial. 

The system for entering the data has to be built, has to be secure, and thousands of people (eg, pharmacy staff) who want to do something else will have to be trained and the technical support team for the vaccinator entities as well as for the general public needs to be up to speed.

Also, it is easy for us to assume computer literacy which may not exist for some parts of the population. Back in the ‘80s, our support people had conversations (with mathematicians, economists, and their students!) like:

Support person: “Now copy the highlighted text to the clipboard”
Support person: <long pause> Hello?
User: “I’ve looked all over. My computer doesn’t have a clipboard!”

My guess is that about 20% of the population is still at that level, and the need to be supported.

And Murphy will be in the wings, watching carefully.


Sent from my iPa

> On Mar 13, 2021, at 1:06 PM, Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> 
> Biden promised a Federal Website to give citizens easy an accurate access to vaccination appointments. Fully operational May 1, date that all Americans wishing a vaccine/vaccination will be able to obtain one.
> 
> Assume 50,000 vaccination sites, 50, 15-minute, time slots per day and, at that time, a maximum of 150 million clients.
> 
> There are several people on this list who, I believe, could build this Website over the course of a weekend, including UE (user experience) elements like Google Maps for site locations, and install it on a cloud server for volume scaling/descaling. Allow a month to collect data - the only thing really problematic is a list of sites, addresses, and operational hours (to constrain the daily calendar slots).
> 
> Total cost: < $25,000 ($500 hr - you folks deserve this pay rate - for 40-50 hours)
> 
> Now the wager: I bet that the feds will contract with a major software development corporation for development. Contract will be in the range of 5 and 10 million dollars; there is a 50% chance the site will be late or deployed with partial functionality; there is a 20% chance that it will be as dramatic a failure upon debut as was the healthcare.gov site.
> 
> Risk is two beverages of your/my choice — payable when next we can share a physical presence.
> 
> davew
> 
> 
> 
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