This is a pinned post which will be updated.
This is version 1.0 Monday March 30, 2020
We have the existing tools to address the economic recovery from the SARS-COV2 virus infection.
What we need is cooperative political will power through organization. This has to scale to the entire U.S. It has to be specific to our country which places a high value on self organization and minimal bureaucracy. As such, effective mobile authorization is a difficult problem, in general we need to rely on common goodwill and design processes that are very effective. Business processes are important but are very complex. We also need a way to disrupt and effectively navigate these processes without a great deal of overhead. If that takes place, we don't pay extra! Well organized supply chains get people what they need without added costs.
This needs to be alligned with Public Health best practices and mapped onto the geopolitical structure of the U.S.
Domain names don't do that. A thousand random web sites can't be authoritative and this invites the typical problems associated with the Wild West mentality of the quack medicine show hucksters found on the Internet.
So fixing the Internet is the first thing. Right we all love the Internet, without it, we would be going crazy during the quarantine. Yet eventually, we need to go out and do stuff. ASAP. Without causing more infections and death.
Sarcastically, that can't be so hard, is it?
Well it would be unless we had this secret weapon stored away in that big Raiders of the Lost Ark government warehouse to use to fix the problem. Funded originally by the National Science Foundation when the Internet was just a child back in 1993. Fortunately as an Internet Archeologist, I discovered this as one of the "Grand Challenges" and years later was asked to develop it. As a result it has matured and parts of it are in common use by anyone who uses a web browser.
Yet the more difficult parts are not widely used. We held a conference at the National Institute of Health to discuss the thornier problems Be my guest if you want to listen to all 9 plus hours. However the people in the room essentially understood the problem. It was quite a grouping of non political thought on organization, like how do people traverse road blocks put up by local organizations in emergencies, that kind of thing. Essentially we are a patchwork of political authorities.
Of course, typically politics wins at the expense of people's lives, as evidenced by the officials in Wuhan who falsified the early virus reporting until the original whistleblower managed to get the message out, who then died from the virus. We squandered a month here in the US because the virus is effectively attacking the current infrastructure. It attacks the social infrastructure of how things are typically done.
Meaning the power and political cartels around the the current infrastructure. It is as much about the fragility of the medical system as it is about the costs around providing healthcare.
As Antoine Artaud noted in "The Theater and it's Double" the plague not only infected and killed people, but fundamentally changed the way people related, that it was a virus that made some old ways impossible to maintain.
There will be many different Covid business solutions but there will be a difficulty to integrate the entire experience from a UX perspective requires integration at scale. My first use case study is Uber and city governments that have active Public Health initiatives.
This is my own specific solution based on my Intellectual Property and current Open Systems distributed technology as an International Standards Organization developer.
My experience in applying ISO standards has been useful.
A few advantages:
1. They scale well on a country level
2. They are already vetted and available for analysis.
3. They play nicely with the Internet since the Internet incorporates many aspects of ISO while still maintaining it's own way of doing things
4. The solutions generally are not expensive to implement since software already exist but are more centralized in nature.
5. The results are essentially owned by the people who maintain it.
A few disadvantages:
1. As backend processes, they scale well to data centers and as services, but the end user has no general idea what is going on because the data is buried many screens deep
2. The process is essentially political, (however my IP covers the entire US, so that's OK, but it will have to compete with every other solution out there for mind share, and people understand brands like Microsoft and Oracle, more than the standards themselves)
3. Generally the entire system is hampered by a lack of understanding, but has deep roots in Internet history, which is a continual food fight of innovation. As a distributed system it also competes for mind share with ideas like Block Chain
4. It uses strong encryption which runs counter to the idea of government health care surveillance of scraping data off all communications. HIPAA has specific authorizations for health data surveillance for public health concerns for national security and law enforcement. As such, they don't exactly want you accessing their internal Covid tracking system via API, so a way of clearing Covid status is more of a Department of Commerce effort.
