How a crowdsourced website became a main source for info on California vaccines

Through the lens of social media, Patrick McKenzie read the news that California had given counties the green light on Jan. 13 to offer the COVID-19 vaccine to individuals 65 and over — and then he saw the stories unfolding about seniors scrambling to find places to get inoculated.

McKenzie, who lives in Japan, tweeted the idea of starting a website providing California residents with info on where to get vaccinated, and by the next day VaccinateCA was born. It has gone on to become a trusted source for critical information in the state's inoculation effort.

"I thought if any state is likely to have a group of people who could drop in on a project like this, it would be the California tech industry," said McKenzie, who is originally from Chicago and has never lived in California.

McKenzie was right and within minutes fellow Twitter user and California resident Karl Yang took the idea and posted it on Discord, an instant message platform in the video gaming community. Within an hour, Yang had a team of 10 people to launch the site and started work on it that night.

"I joined a few hours later," McKenzie said. "The site went live Thursday morning. We started calling to find the vaccine as soon as hospitals, pharmacies, etc., opened on Thursday."

McKenzie, who paid his way through college by working at a call center, offered up advice on how to expedite the effort and went on to become CEO of VaccinateCA.

Now the site has more than 300 volunteers who have made more than 1,600 calls to 1,400 providers identifying over 100...