The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), now officially named as a pandemic, has begat ungraspable circumstances especially for certain countries like South Korea. Hence, many services are continuously being developed for the safety and stability of the people, while also providing convenient and accurate delivery of information. During the early stages of the outbreak, citizens of South Korea were able to stay away from infected areas through Corona Nearby, a digital map made by Korea University (KU) students. Since the release of their second service, Masks Nearby, the developers are meeting great anticipation from citizens as their ideas and actions continue to battle the chaos of the Coronavirus.
Corona Nearby was first introduced to the public on February 1. The service functions as a digital map that pinpoints the location of the clinics and places that confirmed Coronavirus patients had visited. Within just two days since its official launch, the service accumulated more than 3.9 million users and made its way to the real time query of the South Korean portal site Naver. The service operated side by side with other comparable services such as Coronaita and Corona Map, that share the same hopes of providing reliable information to frightened citizens. On March 4, however, Corona Nearby announced that it will stop updating the service due to a lack of information and motive to continue.
The developers behind Corona Nearby are four KU undergraduates— Choi Juwon (’18, Industrial and Information Design), Kim Jun Tae (‘17, Media and Communications), Park Ji Hwan (‘15, Psychology), and Lee In Woo (‘12, Chinese Language and Literature). Among the four talented developers, Choi Juwon shared, “After seeing a lot of people sharing information among themselves to stay safe from the novel coronavirus, the four of us decided to gather our collective knowledge into creating a meaningful service for our society.”
Moving on to Masks Nearby
On March 7, the developers released their second service, Masks Nearby, and gained immediate attention from the media and citizens. The news had spread as the programmer and celebrity figure, Lee Doo-hee, introduced the launching of Masks Nearby through his social media. The overall planning and development stages were conducted by the students, while Lee supported them by funding the server cost and helped the team with technical difficulties.
Masks Nearby provides the estimated inventory of masks in pharmacies, post offices, and supermarkets around South Korea. Following the government’s system to fundamentally control the mask shortage, the service also implemented a function that allows users to confirm the days on which they are eligible to purchase a mask. The website specifies that “the information on the location of pharmacies is not in real time,” and is also promoting their fundraising campaign for further mask donations.
As the situation with the Coronavirus worsened rapidly, the developers decided to move on from Corona Nearby towards a more suitable service to truly help the people. “We got the idea when we heard that one of our acquaintances had come back from a devastating journey to the pharmacy in which he found out that there were no masks left for him to buy,” said Choi. “We realized that there needed to be a more realistic service to help people, instead of informing them about which places to avoid through Corona Nearby when it is nearly impossible at this point.”
However, the service met obstacles as the inventory remains unstable or unknown for most of the distributors around the country. “We were originally planning on disclosing the inventory of all public vendors, but many pharmacies were reluctant to provide such information,” said Choi. “We are hoping to utilize more of the government or corporate open data for the database as more people start to use this service.”
Receiving Support From Hyundai Card and Other Organizations
As citizens’ interests in information services such as Corona Nearby increased rapidly, so did the interest of companies in sponsoring and collaborating with the developers. Hyundai Card was one of the first to contact the Corona Nearby team, offering them financial and spatial support through their “Studio Black” project. Studio Black provides benefits such as a full studio to work in, and the provision of more investment opportunities for the developers. “It is nice to have such a place for our regular meetings,” shares Choi. “On the other hand, I still wonder sometimes if we really do deserve to be in such a great place.”
Lee Doo-hee also contributed significantly to the success of Masks Nearby by bringing on more organizational support for the developers. The team is now receiving more data and technological support from a variety of providers. After receiving an immense amount of positive feedback and experiencing heavy traffic on the website, Lee responded, “We will try to increase the number of servers quickly, so that more people can use it.” He ended, “I think coding is more meaningful when there is social influence involved,” and thanked the team of KU undergraduates for their efforts.
KU’s Like Lion
Like Lion is an educational organization that provides insight on programming and IT-services. Managed by Lee Doo-hee, the organization was first created in 2013 and has been producing many IT-based services created by teams of skilled undergraduate students. Choi shared that his experience at Like Lion KU helped him significantly in the development of Corona Nearby. “For the one year I spent as a member of Like Lion KU, I practiced shaping and implementing my ideas through various events,” said Choi. “I think that is why I was able to organize and create Corona Nearby as soon as I made the decision to do so.”
Among the team members, Choi and Park Ji-hwan will stay at Like Lion KU as the management committee this year to work on their next curriculum.
As exemplified by the four developers’ outstanding efforts in aiding societal action, Like Lion is seen to evolve further into a nationwide educational organization. Masks Nearby will continue to serve as a reliable information service for citizens, all living on with a shared desire and optimism for the pandemic to finally go west.