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The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

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Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#121

Post by philipashlock »

It's also worth noting that Congress is threatening to cut the budget for the project that tracks overspending on IT projects - the IT Dashboard. While the IT Dashboard tool was properly open sourced and the codebase is doing well out in the wild, the continued use of it for the Federal Government isn't totally free, but the very small budget required to keep something like this running can prevent spending hundreds of millions of dollars on excessive IT projects.

For more info on budget cuts that could effect projects like the IT Dashboard, see: http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/11/16/crunch-time-in...

For information on the open source IT Dashboard project, see: http://civiccommons.org/2011/05/it-dashboard-six-weeks-in/

Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#122

Post by freehunter »

potatolicious wrote: post #119
freehunter wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's all 'fail early, fail often' here on HN until the government does so, then failure and experimentation are considered intolerable inefficiencies. I don't _want_ my government to fail early and fail often. I don't _want_ them to experiment. I want stability, I want them to be on this side of the bleeding edge, I want them to be a generation behind. When a startup takes this approach, the risk v reward is shared…

Vehemently disagree. What you're proposing will put all government data behind paywalls - even if some of them will be relatively short ones. Right now my transit authority runs a halfway-decent website along with a freely accessible API. The website is functional, but not perfect. There is a thriving market for people who can present the same data in much more usable ways, for profit. This seems ideal. What you're s…

That's not exactly how I had pictured it, but I can see how my wording could be interpreted the way you saw it. I'm not proposing the APIs be the ONLY way to get the information. Government websites can be useful when done right. What I'm suggesting is that instead of getting into the smartphone app business at this point in the market, have the website be accessible to anyone (maybe with a mobile hook around the site) plus APIs for all the sources the site can give you. That way there's a free and established method of getting the information where you want it, while there can also be a closer-to-bleeding-edge version available in a more convenient format if you so choose.

I didn't really mean "that the government never engage itself in building frontends", I meant that the government, at this point, refrain from building smartphone apps. Until the app market is as standardized and established as the web, it will always be a waste of money to build apps for one platform, and a money sink to include them all.

Sorry for the miscommuication.

Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#123

Post by DanielBMarkham »

This is definitely hacker-bait. Cue up all the folks complaining about wasteful government, then cue up the hotshot programmer folks who will tell us they can code this in 2 hours while drunk, then cue up the FOIA folks, then the folks who feel any critique at all of government is indicative of right-wing extremism, and so on.

I remember when the IRS spent 4 Billion on a new computer system and had nothing to show for it. The joke I used for a week was "Hell, they could have paid me $2 Billion and still not had anything to show for it -- and saved half their money."

The problem those of us with lots of internal government experience is that most "normal" folks have literally no idea how much waste there is. Yes, it's like a big university. Yes, it's like BigCorp. But no, it's so far beyond those concepts that if that's the only frame of reference you have, you've missed it.

I love my country and love paying taxes for it to do useful things. But there simply is no system in place for shutting things down. It just keeps growing. In the private sector the measurement is "does it do something that folks will pay us for?" because if it doesn't, folks eventually stop paying, and the company goes away (although it might take decades). In the public sector the metric is "does it make a politician look bad?"

There's a reason Congress delegates all these powers to all these agencies. It's the same reason we have so many "Tsars". Nobody is directly accountable. It's all set up so that if there is a problem, some poor schmuck gets hauled before an investigative committee to get the riot act read to them. That way the guys who are supposed to be really responsible -- the Congressmen -- get to play the part of the person looking to fix things. Politics. It's a beautiful thing.

So at the end of the day I'm not really sure this is newsworthy. I could tell similar stories involving tens of millions of dollars, and I bet we could come up with a list of hundreds of these things. Anybody remember the FBI case file system? This is just way small peanuts. Perhaps the "Android app" part of it is enough to be newsworthy, but in my mind that's a benefit: today there are a lot of people pleading to move away from COBOL systems in some government agency -- and losing. I feel really sorry for those guys.

Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#124

Post by cleaver »

In my experience (over a decade consulting to government in Canada), not charging enough can sometime put you at a competitive disadvantage. The purchasing decisions are often made by someone who doesn't understand the technology and their prime concern is risk. They don't want to be "the guy who chose the vendor who screwed up". In government, as often as not, you may not get promoted for doing something great so much as by not doing anything bad.

A lot of cost can be added through management of non-technical aspects. The wording may have to go through rounds of approval, goals and features may shift, etc. The cost of writing endless detailed RFP's and the long sales cycles increase the cost.

That said, there are also a lot of "consultants" who really are just crap. It made me embarrassed to be in the same business and that is part of the reason I don't work for government clients anymore.

Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#126

Post by rbarooah »

101001010111 wrote: post #98
rbarooah wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? It's clear that open source projects can produce excellent quality software. It's also clear that proprietary software can be excellent quality. Both can also produce garbage. If you have evidence that open source can produce generally better quality software, or is consistently better for the same kinds of problem, I would like to see it presented.

Thanks for the reply. Did you notice my choice to use the words "can produce" (as in "sometimes") not the word "produce" (as in "always")? I would never make the later statement: open projects always produce higher quality software than proprietary ones. That's not my belief. As such, you are asking me in your last sentence if I have evidence to support a statement I would never make. Of course, the answer is no, bec…

I did notice.

I don't think you're claiming that open source software is always better.

I do think you're claiming that overall open source software is systematically better in some way than proprietary software, obviously not in every instance and subject to noise and variance. Feel free to correct me if you not making any such claim.

I'm asking for evidence because you stated catgorically that evidence exists but I have personally never come across it.

What is the evidence you referred to in your original comment?

Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#127

Post by j-kidd »

TheRevoltingX wrote: post #117
jellicle wrote: post #62

Fine. "6 hours maximum", says the author, for an app translated into English and Spanish that interfaces with a remote database and performs some user-initiated calculations, and also has a bunch of static pages. Before starting you must consult with at least a dozen people who know very little about Android and succinctly describe the capabilities of the smartphone and what sorts of applications are even possible. F…

Heh, I feel bad for any products you spearhead. Your definition of good quality is poor. I am a professional Android developer. Something like this wouldn't take more than a day. It's a piece of cake. What I suspect happened here is that the project was outsourced. These silly people tried to save money by hiring a foreigner to talk to another foreigner developer and get the app developed. To work on and a deliver a…

Get off your high horse. Being American doesn't automatically make your code better. As a "foreigner", I recently had to deal indirectly with American developers (to integrate our product with theirs at the request of the client). They charge 100K USD for something that only needs 2 man days, didn't code to the specifications (set by themselves), and took forever to fix any problem on their end.

Bad developers exist everywhere.

Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#128

Post by potatolicious »

freehunter wrote: post #122
potatolicious wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vehemently disagree. What you're proposing will put all government data behind paywalls - even if some of them will be relatively short ones. Right now my transit authority runs a halfway-decent website along with a freely accessible API. The website is functional, but not perfect. There is a thriving market for people who can present the same data in much more usable ways, for profit. This seems ideal. What you're s…

That's not exactly how I had pictured it, but I can see how my wording could be interpreted the way you saw it. I'm not proposing the APIs be the ONLY way to get the information. Government websites can be useful when done right. What I'm suggesting is that instead of getting into the smartphone app business at this point in the market, have the website be accessible to anyone (maybe with a mobile hook around the sit…

The problem is that there is no reasonable way to draw the line. If the government should remain in the business of providing frontends to their data, where do you draw the line as to where they should and shouldn't go?

It's not as if publishing a smartphone app is exactly "bleeding edge" these days. Third party smartphone apps have existed for almost four years now.

My point is - I fail to see how this is an issue with the government trying to pursue "too much innovation". This could have just as easily happened with an overpriced website contract, but I doubt we'd be sitting around arguing whether or not governments should publish data on a website!

Re: The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application

#130

Post by TheRevoltingX »

j-kidd wrote: post #127
TheRevoltingX wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, I feel bad for any products you spearhead. Your definition of good quality is poor. I am a professional Android developer. Something like this wouldn't take more than a day. It's a piece of cake. What I suspect happened here is that the project was outsourced. These silly people tried to save money by hiring a foreigner to talk to another foreigner developer and get the app developed. To work on and a deliver a…

Get off your high horse. Being American doesn't automatically make your code better. As a "foreigner", I recently had to deal indirectly with American developers (to integrate our product with theirs at the request of the client). They charge 100K USD for something that only needs 2 man days, didn't code to the specifications (set by themselves), and took forever to fix any problem on their end. Bad developers exist…

Erm, what I mean is that foreigner as in not from the country the project is originating from.

To you, the American were foreigners which further enforces my point that working with foreigners in an issue.

I'm not saying that because I'm American my code is better. I'm saying that because I'm local and I care more I produce better quality.

BTW, in my story some of the most incompetent people were indeed American. The other developer did the best he could, and the recruiter too. The process was broken from the beginning. They wrote really bad documentation, and incorrect formulas. The source was bad, but it took much longer to get all the formulas properly documented and figured out.

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