YC's request for startups: Government 2.0

http://oss4gov.org/manifesto

I have come to the conclusion that commercial offerings in the government space are just fucking over the taxpayer and should be replaced by open source services maintained in specific ways

- OSS for gov should be seen as a pro bono "year out" for professionals on their journeyman year

- OSS needs to be funded at government level for development and for ops separately. Something like a kickstarter / auction for features and for support

- this oss suite gets to become well known and cross supported - because so many small companies work on it they can become a matrix like support network - no worries that there is not a single huge supplier "supporting" their crap source, here comes a "Guardians of the Galaxy" web of small ships all able to pick up the load from another because they all know this big code base

- This is partly "let's bring our government into the digital age, but more importantly its "let's bring all governments" - including those not so democratic. Look at how the GDPR just made itself the default. Now think of every small interaction with government being designed with individual agency in mind. this is potentially the biggest act of cultural "laying down of rails" since the Napoleonic code. Shall Western democracy do it?

- remember "developer hegemony" - this is where such firms would do well

Any way - bed time so not well put but it all popped into my head so wanted to share

Plus it is becoming increasingly risky to engage with for-profit companies for certain things because of their insatiable desire for data on their customers.

There are many spaces that can be maintained either publicly or privately that when privatized don't always result in the best outcomes for consumers. A good example are private utilities.

I had a relative that sold his house in a municipality in east Texas and moved to a new development in central Texas. He intentionally chose a house just outside the nearest municipality to avoid paying local taxes. It all seemed great until he got his first water bill from the private water company, only to find that his water bill was astronomically higher (2.5-3x more). His other private utilities were a little higher than what he paid previously, but he was particularly upset about the water.

The water company isn't some multinational corporation, but they have a profit incentive, zero competition, and they control the water infrastructure, so the community there doesn't have much leverage in that scenario.

We are the working on building a free universal basic safety net for all: https://betterbank.app/

Essentially it's a checking account+insurance policy, bank with us and if you ever got hurt we will pay upto $5k in cash…use it for out-of-pocket expenses+ lost wages. It's free because we make money from debit interchange, targeted at either uninsured young folks who find obamacare to be too expensive or families with high deductibles.

Do we qualify as a profit minded start also doing good? If not, are there any other models out there