Software Engineers' Response to Public Crisis: Lessons Learnt from Spontaneously Building an Informative COVID-19 Dashboard

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak quickly spread around the world, resulting in over 240 million infections and 4 million deaths by Oct 2021. While the virus is spreading from person to person silently, fear has also been spreading around the globe. The COVID-19 information from the Australian Government is convincing but not timely or detailed, and there is much information on social networks with both facts and rumors. As software engineers, we have spontaneously and rapidly constructed a COVID-19 information dashboard aggregating reliable information semi-automatically checked from different sources for providing one-stop information sharing site about the latest status in Australia. Inspired by the John Hopkins University COVID-19 Map, our dash-board contains the case statistics, case distribution, government policy, latest news, with interactive visualization. In this paper, we present a participant's in-person observations in which the authors acted as founders of https://covid-19-au.com/ serving more than 830K users with 14M page views since March 2020. According to our first-hand experience, we summarize 9 lessons for developers, researchers and instructors. These lessons may inspire the development, research and teaching in software engineer aspects for coping with similar public crises in the future. The 2019 Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) outbreak has spread rapidly around the world. By October 2021, it has caused more than 240 million infections and 4 million deaths. Although the world is acting against the virus, some information on the Internet has not been updated in time, and there are also many rumors on social media. Therefore, software engineers have developed COVID-19 information dashboards such as the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Map and the World Health Organization COVID-19 website to provide the public with one-stop reliable COVID-19 related information. The author has also developed a COVID-19 dashboard https://covid-19-au.com/ that provides case statistics, case distribution, government policies, latest news, and interactive visualization during the pandemic in Australia. It has been popular since March 2020 and has provided 14 million page views to more than 830,000 users. In this paper, the authors discussed how they built the COVID-19 dashboard website and how they formed and managed a team of volunteers to help and maintain the project. More importantly, the authors summarized 9 lessons for developers, researchers and instructors based on experience. These courses may inspire them in development, research and teaching to deal with similar public crises in the future, and ultimately bring accurate information to public users more effectively.