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In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

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Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#231
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure people will be lining up to take these board positions when the punishment for project failure is prison. Maybe that's a little far, no?

Or why not execute them instead? Worked very well for ages ... More seriously, there usually are no simple solutions to complex problems. And government is a very complex problem. So many people with so many opinions - and everyone involved afraid to say one wrong word or make one wrong decision. I don't think more fear helps there. I mean - prison for corruption - yes! But prison for incompetence, no. Then you also…

> prison for corruption - yes! But prison for incompetence, no.

And how to decide which is which? Effectively there's not much difference

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#232
Exactly the same is happening in Hungary. There was a huge educational system developed for schools from extremely huge budget but both the backend and front-end is crap. There was an alternative front-end built similar to the Swedish way but they were forced to shut it down.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#233
post #134

This is clearly malicious, definitely illegal and should be brought to a court of law. Frankly, I see jail time for the contractors doing this.

An expert on Swedish law? Got a cite for what they might be breaking?

Nearly all nations have laws against misuse of taxpayer money. I believe a case can clearly be made for embezzlement and breach of public trust under Chapters 9 and 10 of the Swedish Penal Code.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we though? There's a couple of government watchdogs that specifically track waste of taxpayer money, and sometimes underlying corruption. Those names (Slöso) are considered by both politicians and certain political leaning citizens as "right wing capitalist propaganda machines/special interest outlets". I vividly remember how everyone shrugged of some small, local politician spending 50 Million SEK(5 Mil USD) on s…

Slöseriombudsmannen is employed by the private lobbyist group Skattebetalarna. The love to rage about stuff like the thing you mentioned but have “a curious disposition” with stuff like Nya Karolinska: https://www.skattebetalarna.se/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Sk...

And your point is? Never claimed they were perfect and some of their more nitty picky hit pieces have been criticized by their followers too.

My point is rather that the issue of "wasting tax payer money" should in principle not have any political side; its about efficiency and both left and right should engage in the question. If anything the side that is vouching for more government should be the one leading the discussion of the efficiency of tax payer money utilization.

Yet most just jump to simple adhomiem attack on the critisizers. "right wing propaganda"; That was my point. That we pretend to care but we don't, and rather switch the discussion to petty tribalist name-calling.

And I'm well aware the sponsors of the organization and that they probably have some rotten eggs in the basket too.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also internal company politics. What would fix much of this, for many projects, is a very experienced product person with final say over every feature, reporting directly to the CEO / board, and outranking everyone else in terms of decision making.

Sure, having skilled people with the right to make decisions solves almost everything. But who decides who is skilled enough? Then we are quickly in the realm of politics ..

Someone skilled is less important than someone who’s empowered. These projects fail because of SVPs and CXOs who get to bully their favourite features and requirements as priorities rather than having someone taking a holistic view of the roadmap.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy out here in DK. The most embarrassing example of such crazy targeted laws is the "hand shake with the mayor" requirement for new Danish citizens, clearly target at a certain ethnicity that would hesitate to do just that. The intent is to make it difficult to that ethnicity, the result is just a veiled law that makes them "appear" just enough secular and non-discriminatory. There's a lot I love about life i…

> the "hand shake with the mayor" requirement for new Danish citizens One might wonder what would happen do Danes abroad not respecting the local customs in certain conservative countries.

This was exactly my question while discussing with a few Danish friends who brushed it off saying, “yeah it’s wrong, but it’s not that bad.... while in Denmark they should be willing to live like a Dane”. My argument was whether they would be willing to wear a burka or give up driving as a woman without complaining in Saudi Arabia a not that they are good anywhere. The point is what is wrong should just be called out as wrong and not politically sugarcoated.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#237
post #26

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…

> 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. There's a Cunningham's Law parallel here: the best way to get a good free open source system is to first build a terrible expensive proprietary one with shady business practices, and let the frustrated users do the rest.

That would work if code was reqired to be OSS.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#238

The changes are pretty ridiculous [1], apparently the gobernment's devs kept deliberately renaming a specific header by adding and increasing a number at the end, from `xsrf-token` up to `xsrf-token11` [0], clearly only with the intend to break their rival free market app. [0] https://twitter.com/oppnaskolplatt/status/137505230118290637... [1] https://github.com/kolplattformen/embedded-api/commit/b61122...

They should just fuzzy match the headers!! Just kidding. This is ridiculous

They are now, look at the linked commit.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#239

I don’t understand how it is allowed to use tax money for closed source projects in the first place.

It shouldn't be. The US has the right idea with public domain, but that concept doesn't really exist anywhere else in the world and, for some reason, doesn't really exist for software at all.

> The US has the right idea with public domain, but that concept doesn't really exist anywhere else in the world

It does in my country, Portugal, at least: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom%C3%ADnio_p%C3%BAblico

And it sounds like it comes from some "Berne convention" in which a lot of other countries also participated.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slöseriombudsmannen is employed by the private lobbyist group Skattebetalarna. The love to rage about stuff like the thing you mentioned but have “a curious disposition” with stuff like Nya Karolinska: https://www.skattebetalarna.se/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Sk...

And your point is? Never claimed they were perfect and some of their more nitty picky hit pieces have been criticized by their followers too. My point is rather that the issue of "wasting tax payer money" should in principle not have any political side; its about efficiency and both left and right should engage in the question. If anything the side that is vouching for more government should be the one leading the di…

My point is I don't like them :) Seriously though, I feel they do a lot of astroturfing and smokescreening to make a lot of noise about inconsequential stuff while saying nothing or very tame things about the real leaks in privatized education and healthcare.

If you look at their "Worst of 2020", almost everything is below 10MSek, which is drop in the bucket budgetwise https://skattebetalarna.se/arets-varsta-sloseri-2020/)

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