Idea How To Substantially Increase Corona App Adoption

[peter-126]

Hello,

Thank you very much for investing your time and energy into this beautiful software project.

I have been thinking about how the adoption of contact tracing apps could be considerably increased. As a result I have come to the conclusion that in democracies incentivation and gamification could solve that.

Here is the idea:
A country could reserve a certain amount of money for a prize draw competition on a regular basis (Gewinnspiel). All active users of the contract tracing app take part automatically. In addition, a recommendation system shall be incorporated. Everybody who convinces their friends and family to install the app will slightly improve their chances of winning.

A second wave of infection would cost many lifes, jobs and billions of dollars. What if we could prevent that by utilizing contact tracing apps on a large scale? How much would it be worth to a country to minimize the risk of a second infection wave? I believe that it would be a good deal for its tax payers.

If you like the idea, please feel free to get in touch with me. Thank you,
Peter

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Here are some further thoughts (or brainstorming inspirations):

• Engineering challenge: how could such a system be implemented while maintaining the privacy-by-design architecture at the same time? Think about multiple accounts on virtual machines to increase the probability of winning. Is there a way to implement it without authentication and would authentication for winners be necessary? etc…

• Only people who were actively using the app should be able to take part in the prize competition. E.g. the app needed to be active at least 80% of the time within the last 7 days in order to be eligible to win a prize

• Recommendation system: when recommending the app to somebody else, the recommender and the recomendee shall both have a slightly higher chance to win. Challenge: how to prevent fraud? Limit the max. number of people who can be recommended?

• Add gamification elements: show how many recommendations were made so far, etc...

• Design the system in a way so that many people can win. Instead of 1 person winning 1 million Euro rather have 50 people win 20.000 Euro

• Prize draws should be on a regular basis. There could be a short, weekly national TV-show were the winning numbers (tokens) will be drawn publicly.

• Payment: is there a way how payments can be made to winners in a frictionless (digital) way?

[peter-126]

Luciano Floridi discusses here a lottery system for contact tracing apps here. See also here by Michele Loi.

[mitsuhiko]

Thanks for the useful input. I moved this issue to the new meta repository which can capture all this discussion.