My job tonight is to understand the problems involved with creating a public statewide website that lets state residents book appointments for COVID vaccinations. My goal is to broadly decide if it's a straightforward project complicated only by scale, or if it's a moonshot. (1/)

Possible problems on my list so far:

HIPAA

Pull and coordinate info from multiple, possibly incompatible, state & local databases, possibly with old or badly documented methods for coding access

Possible laws prohibiting certain departments from working closely (2/)

Possible need to collect data that's never been formally organized before (approved immunization sites?)

Moving targets, as different departments and fiefdoms keep changing specs (because the need for this tool is unprecedented)

(3/)

I mean, I'm hip enough to know that this isn't as simple as choosing and licensing some frameworks, buying enough cloud storage and computing units, and keep heating up Hot Pockets until it works. But I don't need to climb a mountain to see the horizon of my ignorance here. (4/)

Oh, forgot one of the most important things:

Regulations that require the job to go to the low bidder and not necessarily the shop best equipped to pull it off. (5/)

If you have special knowledge or experience here, chirp up. Pretend your team has an opportunity to bid on this job. But first you're all going to have a long, loose think session to figure out if this is Very Doable or just A Huge Bag Full Of Hurt And Regret. (6/6)

(Postscript: for the purposes of this thought experiment, assume that your team's only goal is to create a site that _works,_ not necessarily an ideal, future-looking, or even particularly efficient one.)

If we gauge success simply by "a person has an appointment booked within a reasonable time after they visit a site or dial a phone number, without any crashes, infinite loops, or other hangups"...how reasonable is this goal?

A simpler expression of this whole thing is: "If the service is such a hot mess that many people who try to book a vaccination appointment with it fail or give up, is that a reflection of poor work, or of the enormity of the task?"