11–20 of 241 posts
>The city's local government, spent 1 billion Swedish crowns (100 million dollars) over 7 years to build a massive do-everything school IT platform, which students, teachers and parents are forced to use. And their app is awful. Slow, buggy, almost unusable. One parent managed to access other people's private data, leading to @Stockholmsstad being fined for bad security. where is juicy details like who did it? Oracle…
> One parent managed to access other people's private data, leading to @Stockholmsstad being fined for bad security. ... And the fine, levied by bureaucrats paid with taxpayer's money was paid with... Taxpayer's money. “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” ― Ronald Reagan
While I love the David vs Goliath here, I'm going to point out the thing that open source folks just love to fluff over: Who is going to maintain that app over time? Maintenance sucks and is expensive. I'm going through this right now with a security system for a non-profit. The old system is open source and works--but it's 10 years dead. So, they'd like to add these couple features. Who is going to develop that? Who…
While I love the David vs Goliath here, I'm going to point out the thing that open source folks just love to fluff over: Who is going to maintain that app over time? Maintenance sucks and is expensive. I'm going through this right now with a security system for a non-profit. The old system is open source and works--but it's 10 years dead. So, they'd like to add these couple features. Who is going to develop that? Who…
input: 5+ years and 100 million dollars
output: crappy system
maintenance: still necessary, hire anyone but probably the expensive guys from before
The route that these parents demonstrated:
input: a few months and presumably a whole lot less money
output: something that seems to be well-liked
maintenance: still necessary, hire anyone
Regardless of "but who's going to maintain it", the benefits should be clear here. People don't work on open source code because they get paid to and shrug when they do something useless or even detrimental just because the boss says so. They work on it for a passion. Now if you hire a company to write the open source code, you kind of lose that benefit, but if the development is out in the open, the public can at least keep track of it and say "but this doesn't make sense" or "let's get a working system before we spend another 4 years over-engineering and bloating this". This open model is how the corona tracker was developed in the Netherlands and it worked super well. The question is now whether the government will dare to do it again with the next IT project.
"We need a school comms platform. It needs to have messaging and scheduling. People need to be authenticated (duh)."
Now ordinarily I'd say "WTF who would build that for free?" but by the looks of it someone has done substantial work for free already.
Heck, you could probably get free work from the kids themselves. There's plenty of people in education who would want to do odd jobs on it.
Now maybe pay up for a few senior devs and a PM, so that someone is at least responsible for it, with their income tied to it. But make it a small group, for the same reason.
If there's suggestions, or something breaks, there's a place to report that. End of the day, it's a platform for the people by the people.
Sounds like a great way to get a community to build its own infrastructure?
Perhaps the thing to do is to offer up the government project to an open source initiative. "We need a school comms platform. It needs to have messaging and scheduling. People need to be authenticated (duh)." Now ordinarily I'd say "WTF who would build that for free?" but by the looks of it someone has done substantial work for free already. Heck, you could probably get free work from the kids themselves. There's ple…
> One parent managed to access other people's private data, leading to @Stockholmsstad being fined for bad security. ... And the fine, levied by bureaucrats paid with taxpayer's money was paid with... Taxpayer's money. “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” ― Ronald Reagan
> I think you all know that I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help. A great many of the current problems on the farm were caused by government-imposed embargoes and inflation, not to mention government's long history of conflicting and haphazard policies. Our ultimate goal, of course, is economic independence for agriculture, and through steps like the tax reform bill, we seek to return farming to real farmers. But until we make that transition, the Government must act compassionately and responsibly. In order to see farmers through these tough times, our administration has committed record amounts of assistance, spending more in this year alone than any previous administration spent during its entire tenure. No area of the budget, including defense, has grown as fast as our support for agriculture.
From this 1986 speech: https://www.reaganfoundation.org/media/128648/newsconference...
Perhaps the thing to do is to offer up the government project to an open source initiative. "We need a school comms platform. It needs to have messaging and scheduling. People need to be authenticated (duh)." Now ordinarily I'd say "WTF who would build that for free?" but by the looks of it someone has done substantial work for free already. Heck, you could probably get free work from the kids themselves. There's ple…
I love this idea, but it seems that in general bureaucracies are not agile or freethinking enough to be willing to risk doing something like this, even though in the long run it might be amazing. Imagine if an easy-to-administer system of this ilk was freely available and was picked up by school districts around the world; that would be an incredible pool of talent to work with. Especially if the product can be a lit…
I'd love it if we lived in a society where everyone could contribute to everything. You see a bug, you report it on the board, someone says "hey I don't have time but you can look at it, it's gonna be in myscript.py". You fix it, they check your fix, and we're all better off.
Having an army of kids doing it would help everyone. I think working on a real thing instead of a contrived project is huge in the development of coders.
And as you say, they can add their owm imprint. Society has got to renew itself somehow, and it's not by being corporate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love this idea, but it seems that in general bureaucracies are not agile or freethinking enough to be willing to risk doing something like this, even though in the long run it might be amazing. Imagine if an easy-to-administer system of this ilk was freely available and was picked up by school districts around the world; that would be an incredible pool of talent to work with. Especially if the product can be a lit…
Yeah, it's not gonna happen at ant scale soon. Quite simply the bureaucracy is trained to buy things from big businesses. They're the last people to know anything about how technology works, and can't be convinced by anything other than the authority of brand names. I'd love it if we lived in a society where everyone could contribute to everything. You see a bug, you report it on the board, someone says "hey I don't…
> I'd love it if we lived in a society where everyone could contribute to everything.
That's still the dream, but SaaS kills open source in many ways - by monetizing what has already been done for people other than the authors, and by locking all applications behind paywalls. A return to running our own decentralized software, a return to protocols instead of platforms, is what we need to get over this.