A COVID-safe Recovery
A fast-changing legal and regulatory environment requires adaptability
Government agencies will decide whether large events with crowds can go ahead. With ever-changing social distancing regulations local governments face placing measures on public areas to count and monitor capacity in order to comply with social distancing orders. These types of regulations are based on local circumstances and require fast adaptation. Especially, after the second wave a national of directives will require a staged resumption of openings for public gatherings. This is guided by a framework and will be implemented differently country by country. Each region and municipality depending on the circumstances will also move forward at their own pace and take different measures to ease restrictions. It will require local administrations to monitor and support the process by adapting new social distancing measures to local circumstances. Enforcing social distancing measures on public areas can be quite expensive and requires a lot of manpower to check that people are complying.
The problem is most serious where people want to congregate in open spaces like e.g. beaches, parks, public venues and authorities have their hands full developing schemes to manage and control capacity to keep people socially distant. Current schemes around the world involve authorities using police at for instance to count and report on capacity every hour and also ensure people are socially distancing and to actually turn people away when capacity is full. This is not an ideal solution leaving cities to social media as their most convenient avenue to publish capacity which has only ended up frustrating the public.
A COVID-safe plan with high restrictions for businesses and venues
At the same time, private businesses and venue owners are held responsible for the safety of their guests and must maintain certain directives of minimum capacity and attendance. Restaurants, clubs and bars for instance must meet requirements regarding a minimum distance between guests or tables. In order to prevent that, a minimum distance between the guests should be observed monitoring attendance levels.
Another important requirement on the part of politicians is that no "crowd" will be formed, especially at the entrances and exits of venues but also in retail and beauty services it’s important to limit the number of people being served simultaneously. To guard against crowding, most states and government agencies want business owners to use a booking or at least a guest registry system whereby guests can enter their contact details and this hopes to minimize people coming to the area without a reservation.
Germany launched just last month the concept “Click and Meet” , an extension to the already well-functioning Click & Collect shopping, supposed to make shopping possible again whereby a customer must arrange in advance online or by the phone with the respective shop. Customers are allocated a certain time slot.
Why choose LAPIS?
To solve all these issues our team came up with a single solution, LAPIS. Originally programmed during pre-COVID times to tackle Crowd Management for public spaces and events for smaller municipalities, LAPIS (Local Administration Platform Information System) has come a long way and has been now fully developed to become an all-in-one IT system designed for Local Governments for managing, regulating and monitoring capacity and attendance of venues, retail areas, public sites and events for any size of crowd.
LAPIS has a simple function whereby users wishing access to a public area or private venue are issued a reservation which is assigned an access QR code which allows them in, but only if capacity is available. This is done in one of two ways, a Pre-Reservation downloading the LAPIS app or by a walk-up Rapid Check In scanning a QR code on site.
Additionally, LAPIS aims to support health authorities and supporting agencies to implement presence tracing and offers emergency notification public announcing tools while being easy to use for users and being easy to deploy for venue owners, retail managers and event organisers, too.
Opening the LAPIS App, the user is presented with a map centered on their local area. The map has icons for public areas, events and venues that are open to the public and where reservations are allowed. The icons are color coded Green-Yellow-Red based on the current available capacity; Red nearly full, Green rather empty. Tapping an icon brings up details about that location including available capacity and directions. If capacity is not available to book the user is prevented from completing the reservation and will be given instruction to choose either another site or another time. With either Pre-Reservation or Rapid Check In, the user on leaving will check-out (either automatically* or manually) freeing up with space for others.
Moreover, any type of permanent location such as public spaces, hotspots and venues as well as temporary locations for events or emergency shelters during emergency incident operations can be mapped in a matter of minutes in our administrator dashboard.
Depending on the configuration of location LAPIS may verify users the first time they access either the web app or mobile app by asking a mobile number. There’s no need to give any other contact data. We will send via encrypted contact data transmission a verification SMS code to the user’s phone. Once verified LAPIS will never ask for another data entry again. The mobile number will not be stored in any server database.
LAPIS is a brand of Caddor.ch.
Early Adopter Programme
After our successful testing of our minimum viable product (MVP) last autumn, LAPIS will launch the public use beta version under what we call our Early Adopter programme whereby we invite municipalities to use it on a limited number of sites to both test LAPIS to scale publicly and to allow municipalities and early adoption of the platform without charge for use. Early Adopters have the opportunity to provide suggestions for improvement and steer the course of completing the system for full public use.
We offer:
Access to LAPIS based services
Management of sites & capacity
Accommodate multiple user roles (agents, admin, agencies)
Unique QR code system for public spaces
Use of Interface of web and mobile app for rapid check-in & bookings
COVID-19 Presence Contact Tracing
Simple Public emergency notification system
Privacy protected data collection for users
Private Business Registration Service
Horizon Europe
LAPIS is applying at this year’s EIC Accelerator program European Innovation Council (EIC) established by the European Commission, under the Horizon Europe Programme. After having made the decision in 2020 to hold off our application in the last possible moment in order to further develop, adding features, and once event organisers and businesses reopened, do properly in-field testing, our team is now ready to submit our proposal with Caddor, our start-up.
Author
Michele Romano
Founder & CEO
Caddor GmbH
