Healthcare.gov: Code by the People, for the People, Released Back to the People

This reads like the worst marketing mashup this year:

"We knew there were performance and reliability benefits from building the stack on HTML."

I know there are performance and reliability benefits from talking in English.

"You're just talking about content. There just needs to be one server. We're going to have two, with one for backup. That's a deduction of 30 servers"

I'm very happy the government decided to skimp on reliability for a public healthcare market.

"You can put Wordpress into Amazon but then you'll have problems; it wasn't designed to be a cloud application."

Wait wait wait Wordpress isn't a cloud app? Fuck, someone go tell Hostgator that--apparently it can't be done!

"Notably, the HHS team has been using feedback to drive design choices from the beginning, applying the 'lean startup' model to development."

Wow, even the lean startup namedrop.

I'd be a lot happier if, instead of putting the Obama webdev team on the gravy train, they spent that same money--you know--actually fixing healthcare. As it is they seem to be just doing free advertising and lead generation on the public dime for the insurance companies.

From what I know of the project, CMS has a GitHub enterprise account that they used internally to "iteratively create on github," this Repo is the one that moved over after release.

It's a big step to have government releasing ANYTHING on Github. And yes, it's the next logical step for them to start projects on GitHub. But they're not there yet -- its worth noting that neither Sunlight nor Code for America start their projects out in the open 100% of the time either. It's new ground, and government will, I think, move more towards developing out in the open as we progress. But for now, I'm pretty excited that they embraced technology from this decade.

I should note I'm the former Director of Sunlight Labs, and am an advisor to Code for America.

As I understand it, that's correct: built using Github Enterprise internaly and then published publicly. There was code in public, on the Development Seed account, with respect to coding for the project; anyone can go look at the commits there. Your other points speak for themselves.

tbf, there is a good social engineering function to propaganda. Propaganda is not necessarily false, it just can be. If you look at the roots of the word (which originates with the Jesuits) it has the same meaning as "to go viral" in modern Internet speak. To propagate, to organically spread and grow on its own.

My father, who worked with MLK and the SCLC referred to his work in the civil rights and union movements as being "a propagandist for the right reasons" -- a dry jest that should have made your brain trainwreck instantly if you are paying attention. He was an incredibly smart and funny -- and very ethical man. I inherited the family business, which is why I ended up as founding executive director of the Tor Project. You of course are welcome to judge that bit of work on its own basis. I didn't write the software, I just took it from a framing as a gray hat cypherpunk project to being the acclaimed champion of human rights, journalism, democracy rights activists, and apple pie in about six months flat along with seven figures of funding most of it from the US government without which we'd probably be dead meat from the NSA now (IMNSHO, and I don't speak for the current project's management -- only a volunteer these days).

Ultimately, my point is, I've worked with folks in government, and around Alex. And I've worked around these health care exchanges from RomneyCare here in MA.

The fact that they can relaunch, have a database like this work, even get this decision through, is pretty damn revolutionary. That it worked and they didn't get immediately hosed for it -- you have no idea how risky this was for them on an eGov basis, especially in "obamacare" where they have targets on their back for everything.

Give the dudes credit for a little excessive celebration. It's not propaganda -- and if it were...?

Triangulation sucks too.

but that doesn't seem super innovative. others in government have used akamai as origin servers--TSA then DHS did this in 06 and got rid of a bunch of servers.