The website "Tokyo COVID-19 Information," managed by the Tokyo metropolitan government, gets 500,000 views a day. It features such information as the number of confirmed infections with the new coronavirus in Tokyo and the number of tests conducted, and helps concerned people consult experts.
Information on the site is available in English, Chinese and Korean, in addition to Japanese.
The metropolitan government on March 2 asked Code for Japan, an nonprofit organization in Tokyo composed of engineers, to produce a website to help cope with the new coronavirus. It asked the NPO to "make the site available to the public as quickly as possible."
In response, 10 experts, including web designers, started working from home and elsewhere, linking their efforts online. Through such steps as limiting the information on the site to the minimum necessary, such as the number of consultations, for instance, they finished a day and a half after the Tokyo government's request, opening the website to the public late at night on March 3.
It usually takes more than a month for a public administration-related website to be created.
**Tatsuya Ikeda,** a 23-year-old IT engineer who is also a university student in Tokyo, recalled, "We wasted little time communicating among one another, so our work proceeded very efficiently."
Since the site opened, users have made suggestions such as "put the box for choosing a language near the top," and the IT engineers have responded.
"We can't thank people enough for these proposals to improve our site," said Masanobu Tenjin, 54, the chief of the division in charge of promoting digital shift at the metropolitan government.
So-called civic technology, or civic tech in short, tackles various social tasks through information and communication technology. It is now showing what it can do to fight the new coronavirus. The Tokyo government's site has been praised among executives in the IT businesses, who say its graphs and figures can be readily understood.
After the program for the site was made public, similar sites were adopted widely by almost all the prefectural governments in Japan, and even in the United States and Taiwan.
Some IT-related business officials are actively working as volunteers.
**Taisuke Fukuno,** the 41-year-old chairman of the Jig. Jp application-developing company based in Sabae, Fukui Prefecture, in mid-March put up a free website where people can check how many hospital beds are use in each prefecture. The information is based on data made public by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry.
The site is being viewed by about 60,000 people a day, mainly those engaged in health care services. "It's easy to see the current status in rural areas," one user said.
The infection-related data made public by the central and local governments can differ in both content and format, making it difficult for them to be compared and compiled.
Shigeru Saito, the 44-year-old president of Signate, a Tokyo-based AI-development company, created a work website to craft a unified input format for data collected from across the country.
Signate called on the roughly 30,000 IT engineers registered with the company to help with the task, and about 200 have so far taken part in input work as volunteers. Saito said enthusiastically, "Even though we're amateurs in the field of infectious diseases, we can still contribute when it comes to sorting out data."
Japan is in a national emergency, with people in public administrative services and medical institutions preoccupied with dealing with patients. In order to weather this crisis, we must utilize the power of the people.
Read more from The Japan News at https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/
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