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YC's request for startups: Government 2.0

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0

#191

Post by newmac »

"[..] the goal of making America a better place"

This sucks to see from YC. So many of us around the world look to YC as an accessible version of American prosperity. America is an exclusive and very rich club however.

A bigger impact than improving American government would be: Improving American Democracy. Improving global government.

I know things have changed a lot in America in the last few years, but I didn't realize how pervasive the nationalistic mental model had become.

YC: Do good in the world, please.

Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0

#192

Post by llamataboot »

Jun8 wrote: post #85
nabnob wrote: post #28

The solution to income inequality is not going to come from venture capitalists and private companies. I have an idea for a non-profit that tackles a systemic problem, but I can't help but look at some of the other yc grads and think that their companies seem hopelessly out of touch with the problems they're trying to tackle. Promise is mentioned as "tackling mass incarceration", but their company seems geared more t…

You're absolutely correct that good approaches to social problems (don't want to use the term "solution" which is ill-suited, I think) will not come from VCs: It will come from naive entrepreneurs, naive in the sense that they don't quite appreciate the problem they are tackling, because if they do they would never take it on. A simple fact I learned in volunteering that's applicable here, too, is that in tackling th…

As someone who spent my first career in both high-level policy analysis and research into social interventions and also consulted with and helped run multiple non-profits doing direct work with measurable outcomes the idea that it is easy to fund this type of work is ludicrous to me. The lengths I've seen small-medium size non-profits go to stretch a dollar would humble any VC talking about maximizing a runway.

Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0

#193

Post by DoreenMichele »

newmac wrote: post #191

"[..] the goal of making America a better place" This sucks to see from YC. So many of us around the world look to YC as an accessible version of American prosperity. America is an exclusive and very rich club however. A bigger impact than improving American government would be: Improving American Democracy. Improving global government. I know things have changed a lot in America in the last few years, but I didn't r…

This is specifically asking for "Government 2.0" startups. I imagine if they framed that as for the world that would be quite the can of worms and potentially interpreted as calling for global governmental overthrow.

It's reasonably safe to say "oh, god, the US Has Issues and please help us with it." It's pretty widely accepted that America is shite for a wealthy, developed country by quite a few metrics.

Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0

#194

Post by AlexanderNull »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #134
monocasa wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here in the states we have the USDS and 18F doing great work. The just need more funding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F

Do you have any knowledge about how Code for America is doing? My understanding is that they're more on the citizen engagement side of things and have built a few cool solutions. Maybe we need more orgs like that (or need to contribute more resources to them)?

Code for America continues to grow and release their apps in new areas of the country. They've got their annual summit in Oakland next week (29th) and they'll be looking to get more director level folks involved because of the current growth.

Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0

#195

Post by AlexanderNull »

newmac wrote: post #191

"[..] the goal of making America a better place" This sucks to see from YC. So many of us around the world look to YC as an accessible version of American prosperity. America is an exclusive and very rich club however. A bigger impact than improving American government would be: Improving American Democracy. Improving global government. I know things have changed a lot in America in the last few years, but I didn't r…

America is in the world. Next question please.

Seriously though, there's millions of people here who have been left out of the exclusive and rich club. The UN repeatedly dings the USA for the standard of living of many of our citizens and our terrible legal/justice system. So much of our government meant to help those people is either deliberately underfunded or mismanaged and can use all the help it can get.

How the heck can we figure out how to help government abroad when we can't even get our own right?

Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0

#196

Post by breck »

School-Cotton wrote: post #185
breck wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not something meant to be eliminated I said exactly the opposite: "not eliminate it" > Most of the law is the tradition of judicial interpretation of those statutes. This is a very good point. You could simply have judges write decisions in a decision language as well, which is defined just as the law language is defined.

Okay fine, let me rephrase. It is not something meant to be reduced .

Thanks for the rephrasing.

I should rephrase as well. The language I am proposing offers much stronger control over ambiguity.

Take the 8th amendment: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

What is an "excessive fine" mean? In the language I am proposing it could be defined as is, or in something like:

... cellType dollarAmount number cellType fine dollarAmount cellType adjustedGrossIncome dollarAmount cellType universalExcessiveFineThreshold description As a percentage of adjustedGrossIncome constant .1 nodeType isExcessiveFine cells adjustedGrossIncome fine trueIf fine / adjustedGrossIncome > universalExcessiveFineThreshold ...

So you have more control over ambiguity.

Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0

#197

Post by breck »

School-Cotton wrote: post #188
breck wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not something meant to be eliminated I said exactly the opposite: "not eliminate it" > Most of the law is the tradition of judicial interpretation of those statutes. This is a very good point. You could simply have judges write decisions in a decision language as well, which is defined just as the law language is defined.

> You could simply have judges write decisions in a decision language as well, which is defined just as the law language is defined. But how could you write the laws in the first place? You can't write them in a language designed to be unambiguous, because they are meant to be imprecise.

See basic example code: https://github.com/breck7/jefferson

There will be some ambiguity introduced via the English language (not a problem since you'd still have judges), but the whole thing can be defined, from concepts like true/false all the way to very complicated concepts, in the same universal syntax/language.

Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0

#198

Post by CPLX »

I have a request too. I’d like to see a reduction in the power and influence of unaccountable billionaires over our public policy.

I wonder if the people who write things like this have processed the fact that they are no longer insurgents, but the entrenched establishment with a very bad history of exploiting the masses for private gain.

Any sane person should instinctively distrust the idea of giving valley tech startups and private equity firms more power over the mechanics of government.

Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0

#199

Post by empath75 »

tyre wrote: post #119
thomasjudge wrote: post #51

As someone who works in technology in the public sector at the state level, let me just say that there is tremendous greenfield opportunity for software startups within existing government programs. Probably every program that government runs requires one or more systems to administer it; these are often painfully legacy systems. We are starting to see startups in some of these niche line-of-business areas (Medical M…

100% agree. The problem is not that there aren't opportunities to improve but that getting those into the hands of users is often nearly impossible. Public officials are not incentivized to improve software or even services. People vote based on emotions and the downside of fucking up a software upgrade is far more politically damaging than the upside of fixing it. Until the procurement and purchasing process is impr…

I was working on a contract to replace a legacy system for the federal government, and we were doing agile development (or attempting to) and let me tell you the interface between agile teams and feds is painful.

Agile development is about people over process and government is about process over people (for valid reasons!)

We sat through a retro after a sprint with some of the feds and the questions were all about deadlines and dependencies and when such and such would be complete so they started putting everything on the board and made us throw out story points and put dates on everything and we were like, congratulations you just reinvented the Gantt chart.

Like I get it, they have different incentives than most product owners do, but yeah if you think you’re going to reinvent government by bringing silicon valley development practices to Washington, you are going to have a bad time.

Re: YC's request for startups: Government 2.0

#200

Post by empath75 »

tyre wrote: post #150
yeahitslikethat wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same experience. Too many hoops to jump through. No one trusts the decisions public employees make so there's too much Red tape. Sales is too expensive. The value to the public might be millions. The software value to the organization is nil. Their attitude: Oh we can process applications 10x?? Why bother? The people will wait. They always have. Why change it now? Staff won't want to learn something new.

And they almost literally cannot go out of business. The incentives aren’t there. I don’t know. I sincerely hope someone figures it out. We could improve so so so many things

the government isn’t about efficiency, it’s about fairness. (In theory).
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