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The White House is briefly shutting down the "We The People" petition website, but promises that all existing petitions will be reinstated on the new, less costly site:
The White House has said it will be shutting down its website for petitions from midnight on Tuesday until a new one is set up in late January. The "We The People" site was set up by the Obama administration in 2011. It promised a response to all petitions drawing more than 100,000 signatures but the Trump administration has not responded to any since January.
The White House said its new platform would save taxpayers more than $1m (£746,500) a year. The total budget of the White House for 2018 is $55m and its information technology budget for the year is $4.94m.
A White House official told the Associated Press news agency that the administration would "respond to public concerns next year" and that all existing petitions would be reinstated then.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday December 20 2017, @06:05PM (2 children)
Evidently the public is still fucking stupid about this sort of thing, or they wouldn't think they could pull off an idiotic scheme like this.
The cost of building a new system to replace the existing system will dwarf the maintenance costs of keeping the existing system running. The only way this would not be true is if the existing system is subject to really bad contracts, which should not be the case with an open source implementation.
Given that they don't have to pay licensing fees for Drupal, the only explanation for the current maintenance price tag is a) bad infrastructure contracts, and b) bloated personnel costs. The solution to A is to move the existing system to cheaper infrastructure. The solution to B is to stop double-counting IT's time - when 30 minutes/day of maintenance is counted as a full 8-hour workday.
Furthermore, there's no reason to believe that the maintenance costs for the new system will be any less than the current system. Unless the orange man is going to negotiate the contracts himself (and let's be honest, they'd probably be more crooked if he did), we're likely to end up with about the same level of crappy infrastructure contract as before.
Next we'll hear that he wants to spend $5 billion to modernize the cheap, proven floppy-disk-based nuclear launch system...by putting it on the internet and paying for cloud deployments!
XKCD: Obsolete [xkcd.com]
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @07:32PM (1 child)
You don't actually believe there will be a new system rolled out next year, do you?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Wednesday December 20 2017, @08:13PM
I believe that the White House expects most people to believe such ridiculous claims, and that makes me sad.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?