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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

#41

Post by renewiltord »

Government organizations are terrified about open source initiatives. There's something strange about it.

You could volunteer to do all the work and they'll still oppose you at every turn.

My hope is that we'll reach a stage where citizen participatory programming is normal for all. Where my dad could offer a PR to fix a typo on a government page casually as he browses it.

I have a feeling we're not far off but you need it to happen in a place with low entrenched interests but with sufficient enlightenment.

I think big US cities have the latter but not the former, and authoritarian developing nations lack both the former and the latter. So maybe smaller Western nations like Estonia.

Or, my biggest hope, sufficiently advanced townships in America.

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

#42

Post by Cullinet »

core-questions wrote: post #16
lordnacho wrote: post #15

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 had the incredible luck to meet on the day of his involuntary retirement from running the largest global financial aide fund until the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation exceeded the figures involved, forced into very early retirement because the New Labour government dictated by fiat the abrogation of every civil servant who was recruited internally and not from university. My advisor and great friend could manage with a team of a few percent in headcount of the present incumbent cohort, a multi billion pounds development organisation and had proven himself in the most fraught of contentions between government and industry (Mike was the hatchet man tasked with getting the dirt and lowdown on the infamous Westland affair that nearly toppled the Thatcher government, for only one example of his capabilities) and consequently I'm not persuaded of the whole prejudice against bureaucracy which I know personally in the UK has been a consequence of this most disastrous and indiscriminate violence against the national interest in all of my understanding of administrative modern history.

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

#43

Post by yoelo »

hpkuarg wrote: post #28

I wonder how Swedes maintain their reputation of having a well-run, corruption-free public sector?

Corruption and inefficiency of this kind is a relatively new phenomenon, stemming from a regime of letting private contractors run the whole show. A fun fact is that Stockholm has one of the most expensive buildings in the world: Nya Karolinska, which has cost (converted from Swedish currency) around 2 billion dollars. The reason behind this is that construction was run as a public-private partnership. Meaning you shove loads of cash into private hands while you get none of the benefit.

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

#44

Post by eCa »

IIUC, the open source app uses an unofficial/private api to communicate with the city’s application backend? Regardless of anything leading to the open source app being built, I struggle to take their side here.

Looking at the code, it appears that they authenticate against the api? So it’s a third-party app using an api, against the first-party’s expressed wishes, to read and/or manipulate student data?[1]

Of course the city will defend against that.

[1] Correct me if I’m wrong here.

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

#46

Post by Twixes »

908B64B197 wrote: post #4

> 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

IMO the problem here is exactly that the project was outsourced. Outsourcing is likely to lead to crap products and with clueless public funding the costs end up astronomical relative to the quality of the result. In-house software expertise could result in better quality (this budget could definitely afford a lot of great engineers) and more controllable costs.

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

#47

Post by anm89 »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #36
johngalt wrote: post #7

It's amazing how often giant IT projects like these go off the rails. Exploding costs and garbage implementations. If you start the sentence with: "A 5+ year government IT project that cost over 100 million-" I already know how the story ends. How do we improve this common scenario? What are the root causes? The common themes are: 1. Lack of technical project competence at the decision maker level. 2. Scope creep. Wh…

Cities are ran by politicians that in most cases are too incompetent to do anything better with their lives. When incompetent leaders make decisions, the incompetence is flowing to most, if not everything they do, including this kind of projects. There is no immediate fix for this situation, unless the decision would be made by some kind of city manager or board of experts that are recruited based on competence and h…

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?

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

#48

Post by mwidell »

snicksnak wrote: post #5

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...

Maybe Öppna Skolplattformen should just change their code to identify the token by its contents, no matter the parameter name?

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

#50

Post by enedil »

mwidell wrote: post #48
snicksnak wrote: post #5

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...

Maybe Öppna Skolplattformen should just change their code to identify the token by its contents, no matter the parameter name?

Good luck with that if it's a CSRF token.
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