Hello everyone. Happy New Year.
AirNZ
I recently flew for a short trip with family from Auckland to Christchurch and return.
I heard someone mention on the radio that you could upload the vaccine pass to your Airpoints profile - and that it was really easy.
On desktop it looks like this:
Pick a file (the certificate itself, a photo, or screenshot) and the software was able to verify the pass as coming from MOH:
Pretty slick. My partner did the same and we were able to scan the kids in when we got to the checkin machine - they don’t have Airpoints profiles.
However, I was curious to know how they knew it was actually my pass - so on the way home I uploaded my son’s pass to my profile and both of us happily flew on that. Whoops! This may have changed? Please let me know in the comments below.
I let AirNZ know in the post-flight survey. I also let them know that I found it strange that AirNZ staff were using cloth masks, and food and drinks were still being served given the impending Omicron threat.
Provida
At Provida we had been asked by our customers to create a dashboard for vaccination passports for staff - so I was pretty interested in the AirNZ workflow. People were concerned about requesting and storing so many physical vaccine passes - and were keen to check that a vaccine pass was legit, and store the expiry date.
And while it was not seen as a likely problem - we felt it was important to build an identification mechanism into the workflow if the name of the pass did not match the name on the Provida profile.
Up until that we had built a camera scanner that could verify our users passes. This worked ok, but after some testing we realised most people would only need to do this once every 6 months, and uploading the certificate directly would be the best option for most.
Once uploaded and verified we pull the passes into a dashboard that looks like this:
This is our Shortland St demo site. Perfect name matches are automatically approved. Any names that do not match require a resolution step like this:
In this case I know that Damo is a nickname and that his real name is Benjamin - so I will approve this one. If I am not sure, I might choose to seek further identification.
Is anyone else building things like this? Perhaps there is a better way to do it?
Opensource
Can I please thank again @jon_herries and the team at the MOH for making it easy for us to develop against the vaccine pass specifications. This has really pushed along the concept of verified credentials - this has great application in our world.
If anyone is thinking of building something like this - don’t forget that the team at Vaxx.nz has some code libraries that might help. The Github link is here.
We could not find a suitable React library to read PDF, PNG, JPEG - so we packaged our work up on NPM here. The idea of supporting images is that a user can take a screenshot or photo of a QR code on a certificate they have been issued, and upload that - all using a mobile phone if desired.
You will find the Github library if you want the source code, and there is a demo available too where you can upload any QR code from a file picker and grab the payload. Here is the demo.
Feel free to share.
Cheers, Ben.