DataSquare CEO Park Sun Yeong Creates MERS Map In May That Works As An Online Voting System To Track South Korea’s MERS Outbreak
When the MERS outbreak affected South Korea in May, 26-year-old DataBase CEO Park Sun Yeong immediately got his creative tech juice flowing and constructed a MERS map, an online voting system that would gather information from South Korean citizens, reported PBS on Thursday.
The idea was to let participants decide whether a specific information about the location of a hospital with a MERS victim is true or false by just clicking the up-vote or down-vote buttons. If an information receives five down-votes, it will automatically be hidden from the map.
The site attracted 3,000 visitors per minute within the first three hours of going live online.
"I just wanted to get this information out there as a good programmer, to help people, and to defuse rumors about the situation," Park said. "I didn't know that this map would become so powerful or that it would be used to criticize the government or anything like that."
Park was referring to the citizens' outrage toward the South Korean government for refusing to confirm the names of hospitals that are treating MERS patients on their beds. This then leaves the South Koreans blind as to which areas are to be avoided or to be cautious about.
"There were so many rumors around MERS, yet we couldn't get accurate information on it, making us more anxious about the situation," added Park. "So I thought of making a map that gathers accurate information on it, so I can confirm the facts with people around me."
Park also reached out to 32-year-old "genius hacker" and LikeLion CEO Duhee Lee to equip the site with a new server in order to keep up with the growing number of MERS map visitors per minute.
"We didn't start off with the intention of doing anything heroic," Park noted. "We just developed the website and as we operated it, there were huge participation from the citizens, which we didn't expect at all."
Tech Node reported on June 25 that after seven days of operation, with 340 reported MERS cases and five million visitor, the MERS map website closed as its function was carried over by the government of South Korea.
The South Korean government provided real-time information and updates on the MERS outbreak in the country through its Twitter account @mersKRnow, which gathers updates from 60 twitter accounts of various local governments.
