My hell as a 911 operator

#1

Post by DavidChouinard » Sun, Jul 28, 2013, 4:10 PM UTC

My hell as a 911 operator
nypost.com

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#2

Post by ck2 » Sun, Jul 28, 2013, 4:31 PM UTC

Lowest bidder? No one loses their job for someone dying?

Sounds like a perfect storm.

I'd love to see an itemization for $88 Million and how many vacation homes were bought.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#3

Post by thezach » Sun, Jul 28, 2013, 4:36 PM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #2

Lowest bidder? No one loses their job for someone dying? Sounds like a perfect storm. I'd love to see an itemization for $88 Million and how many vacation homes were bought.

They don't always take lowest bidder.... sometimes it really just boils down to who the contractor knows, or what favors they've done for people (even if they are incompetant)

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#4

Post by kylec » Sun, Jul 28, 2013, 4:43 PM UTC

This seems like a great opportunity for someone to develop an open source high-availability, fault-tolerant 911 dispatch system. Being able to get first responders where they're needed as fast as possible would provide a tremendous public good.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#5

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 28, 2013, 4:44 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#6

Post by richardv » Sun, Jul 28, 2013, 4:45 PM UTC

kylec wrote: post #4

This seems like a great opportunity for someone to develop an open source high-availability, fault-tolerant 911 dispatch system. Being able to get first responders where they're needed as fast as possible would provide a tremendous public good.

That's not how things work... You can't just create some system and see governments flock to you. There are years of consulting and specification requirements.

Linux is open source... Office Libre... Go convince a public office to switch to Ubuntu..

Saving money is often at the bottom of their focus.. and then you have competing interests releasing figures that show it is more costly to switch to free alternatives.

Public spending is a corrupt cycle.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#7

Post by kaiku » Sun, Jul 28, 2013, 4:49 PM UTC

kylec wrote: post #4

This seems like a great opportunity for someone to develop an open source high-availability, fault-tolerant 911 dispatch system. Being able to get first responders where they're needed as fast as possible would provide a tremendous public good.

And for a tiny fraction of $88 million. There's something about throwing such a large amount of money at a project that causes it to bloat into failure.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#8

Post by moogleii » Sun, Jul 28, 2013, 4:49 PM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #2

Lowest bidder? No one loses their job for someone dying? Sounds like a perfect storm. I'd love to see an itemization for $88 Million and how many vacation homes were bought.

Sounds like it could fit perfectly with NYC's current "See something crooked" campaign: http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/6f91a149db2641cc84c25c...

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#9

Post by gregd » Sun, Jul 28, 2013, 4:50 PM UTC

Having been involved in long, arduous government procurement processes, I can assure you that it will leave you shaking your head and wondering how ANYTHING in government gets done.

The trip from RFP to signed contract is maddening and has probably driven more than one government worker to an alcoholic stupor, wishing for the sweet embrace of death.

On a side note, I'm no longer a government employee. My name is Greg and I'm an alcoholic....

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#10

Post by DanielBMarkham » Sun, Jul 28, 2013, 4:54 PM UTC

Pre-9-11, I spent some time doing some high-level analysis, talking to users and administrators, of a nation-wide EMS system for an entire country (Sorry, can't say which) It was a U.S. firm interested in figuring out exactly how much it would cost to create a national system so they could bid on it.

This does not have to be a very complicated system at all. It's basically a real-time workflow system. Information comes in, is assigned a type and other data, and depending on the values is routed to various other people, which also tag and update it. In a way, it's almost like a bug-tracking system. Tickets get made. Tickets get worked on. Tickets get resolved.

Now combine that 10K problem with a large rollout, lots of administrative BS, and $2 Billion? It's wonder the damn thing works at all. A group of hackers could cobble together something over a week with better uptime and more reliability than I'm inferring from this article.

The technical complexity of the problem has nothing at all to do with the political and legal maneuvering required to get and execute a large government contract.