As a programmer in state government this approach is not feasible for many reasons the chief of which is that at almost every level of government we lack technocrats. In the very unlikely event that one is appointed or hired that has Audrey Tang's(from the podcast, digital minister for Taiwan) background I predict that the amount of pushback received from other levels of government and unions would smother any software with similar utility to that of the mask finder. I can't wait to jump to private industry.
This is a 24 minute Planet Money podcast named <i>Fork the Government</i> but the HN title has been changed to match the title in the HTML header. The show interviews two <i>civic hackers</i> [1] Howard Wu and Audrey Tang (Taiwan's Digital Minister) about the technical aspects of Taiwan's coronavirus response.<p>Taiwan has had a total of 815 cases and 7 deaths [2] in a population of 23 million.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_technology" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_technology</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Taiwan" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Taiwan</a>
It's hard to tell why you might want to listen to this from just the title:<p>"But Taiwan has also been taking a relatively experimental approach to the pandemic with technology. Like working with civic hackers to code its way out of the pandemic. Today on the show, we dive into Taiwan's pandemic policies and ask: Would the U.S. ever take a similar approach?"
I don't fully get the title from the content, but perhaps NPR is saying that we should have a different control structure for health related maters... Like for example in Star Trek the only people that can override the captain is the doctor. For medical emergencies they can basically force some course of action. It seems in most countries the top brass is making decisions even though they are not technically qualified to do so.
Cool! She was the primary author on one of the first Perl6 compiler implementations: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugs_(programming)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugs_(programming)</a>
The US government is full of corruption and closed-source companies basically destroying almost all open source collaborative efforts based on greed. Unless a leader steps in that truly understands this and works to get rid of it, then I don't think the US will ever be able to compete.
Audrey Tang (featured in the audio) conducted a long form interview with Tyler Cowen a few months ago in which they talked about this kind of civic development.<p><a href="https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/audrey-tang/" rel="nofollow">https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/audrey-tang/</a>
Those are some really incredible Covid numbers for Taiwan, just, <i>incredible</i>.<p>Having spent time there and seem some poorer areas and very dense areas, 7 deaths is unbelievably great.