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How Local Governments Got Hooked on One Company's Janky Software

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Re: How Local Governments Got Hooked on One Company's Janky Software

#2
Sounds about right. Maybe even typical. Every township has that one guy paying super close attention while contributing nothing other than pissing and moaning. If we really want to change local government software, we need to actually incentivise people to join up with anti merger clause on whatever grants we offer them.

Re: How Local Governments Got Hooked on One Company's Janky Software

#3
My city uses an insane portal that most junior devs could probably replace with a week of hard work. It has massive security holes, uses unstyled HTML and doesn’t have a single convenience built in

I think these platforms just have a ton of features slapped together that barely function and have no thought given to UX, but they check whatever boxes their sales team need.

Re: How Local Governments Got Hooked on One Company's Janky Software

#4
post #3

My city uses an insane portal that most junior devs could probably replace with a week of hard work. It has massive security holes, uses unstyled HTML and doesn’t have a single convenience built in I think these platforms just have a ton of features slapped together that barely function and have no thought given to UX, but they check whatever boxes their sales team need.

This sounds like something https://codeforamerica.org/ might be able to tackle?

https://codeforamerica.org/success-stories/

https://codeforamerica.org/contact-us/

Re: How Local Governments Got Hooked on One Company's Janky Software

#5
https://archive.is/Kpitn

> But adapting the software to the state’s unique regulatory needs proved challenging

A good example that's not taught in CompSci, generic software is an unsolved problem.

In a school environment we contracted someone to write room booking software (A while ago, don't need a list of current solutions)

That's crazy, in an environment that's extremely similar across the worlds schools and also overlaps with non-school environments.

The "unsolved problem" has a lot of elements, bureaucratic, entropy, the value of differences.

But one thing we always see in these $100 million case studies is the government workers won't have specced it properly, so blame will fall back.

The cost is surprising but accurate much as every noob could "write it in a weekend", the fact it doesn't work is tricky.

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