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Obama Takes Step to Improve Government Technology

posted by azrael on Tuesday August 12 2014, @02:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the even-bigger-government dept.

AnonTechie writes:

On Monday the White House announced the creation of a team of digital experts tasked with upgrading the government's technology infrastructure and making its websites more consumer friendly.

The move is aimed at avoiding a repeat of the website debacle that marred the rollout of President Barack Obama's signature health care legislation last year. While the administration ultimately surpassed its enrollment targets, the opening weeks of sign-ups were riddled with website troubles that raised questions about the administration's competence.

The new digital team will be overseen by Mikey Dickerson, an engineer who took leave from Google in order to oversee fixes to the HealthCare.gov site. 

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 13 2014, @04:22AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday August 13 2014, @04:22AM (#80705) Journal

    Every government would benefit from a massive overhaul of its technology. Most of the detractors in the thread so far, however, are quite right that this initiative will go nowhere.

    It seems to me a better way to make meaningful progress toward this goal would be to open source the source code of the bureaucracy. 100% transparency about the technologies and data structures the various departments use, and what hand-offs connect them to others. That would already attract the civic hacker crowd to produce meaningful apps to make government work better. If you slap an X prize on top of that, you'll get not only the civic hackers, who mostly want to do good but also wouldn't mind winning some money, but also the hackers who mostly code for money but also wouldn't mind doing some good.

    That's how you avoid the traps of hiring corporate stooges, academics who know nothing about how the world works, or bureaucrats for whom the answer to every problem is more bureaucracy.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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