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Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

wmhartnett.com

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Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#1

Post by wmhartnett »

Did you catch the part where it said the Census Bureau paid IBM $33.3 million for the poo bucket that is the American FactFinder? Ha ha. That was my favorite part, too.

Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million
wmhartnett.com

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#2

Post by Mizza »

Awesome! I wrote the original FOIA that he references in the beginning of this article, I'm extremely pleased that somebody else took the same initiative!

Is there anything else about the government any of you guys want to know about? I'm getting pretty good at FOIA'ing now.

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#3

Post by wmhartnett »

Mizza wrote: post #2

Awesome! I wrote the original FOIA that he references in the beginning of this article, I'm extremely pleased that somebody else took the same initiative! Is there anything else about the government any of you guys want to know about? I'm getting pretty good at FOIA'ing now.

Thanks for the inspiration! As someone just said on Twitter, "we really should just FOIA the cost of everything with a .gov, just for fun."

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#4

Post by morisy »

wmhartnett wrote: post #3
Mizza wrote: post #2

Awesome! I wrote the original FOIA that he references in the beginning of this article, I'm extremely pleased that somebody else took the same initiative! Is there anything else about the government any of you guys want to know about? I'm getting pretty good at FOIA'ing now.

Thanks for the inspiration! As someone just said on Twitter, "we really should just FOIA the cost of everything with a .gov, just for fun."

Hmm, that might be our next big campaign after we get our Drone project a little more under control ...

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#5

Post by Mizza »

wmhartnett wrote: post #3
Mizza wrote: post #2

Awesome! I wrote the original FOIA that he references in the beginning of this article, I'm extremely pleased that somebody else took the same initiative! Is there anything else about the government any of you guys want to know about? I'm getting pretty good at FOIA'ing now.

Thanks for the inspiration! As someone just said on Twitter, "we really should just FOIA the cost of everything with a .gov, just for fun."

As much as I'd love to do that, I think casting a broad net in FOIA is very difficult and potentially counterproductive. FOIA offices have very limited resources already, so asking for literally everything at once or as lots of little requests performs a DoS attack on the one office of the government that I really like! It does make a good point philosophically, but practically, I think it might be counterproductive. The FOIA law itself also requires requests to be fairly specific.

I bet there are some _specific_ things that members of this community want to know (cost/sources of software, policy memos, etc.) that could be requested, received and processed in a more timely and useful fashion than if we just asked for "(asterisk).(asterisk)".

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#10

Post by wmhartnett »

pcrh wrote: post #7

Interesting use of the gif there. I wonder if there will be a migration of these gifs from meme-based humor sites to more "legitimate" blogs and news sites. They are, after all, the visual equivalent to using quotes by famous people.

No one has ever accused me of being legitimate. There was an animated GIF on The New York Times homepage just the other day, though.
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