[jarmitage]

The FOI part means this is dead on arrival and will be abused all ends up.

For this to work you need the public to understand why DARPA worked. Hiding details of failures makes that impossible (and again, completely open to corruption).

[kurthr]

Yep, seems more like a way to keep scandals like Cummings no-bid contract to his friends from coming to light. If it can be used as a slush fund, it probably will be, and eventually probably exclusively.

https://www.theweek.co.uk/951989/what-next-for-dominic-cummi...

[samizdis]

The data visualisation exercise My Little Crony [1] was featured in some UK media in November. It is described on the site as: A visualization of the connections between Tory politicians and companies being awarded government contracts during the pandemic based on a wide range of investigative reporting.

Perhaps it hit a raw nerve or two.

[1] https://www.sophie-e-hill.com/post/my-little-crony/

[45ure]

>My Little Crony [1] was featured in some UK media in November.

It wasn't widely reported in the mainstream media, but it drew attention via Byline Times. Similarly, the Tufton Street gang, with the same cast of characters, whose tentacles also reach across the Atlantic, will never be featured as comprehensively by the MSM; far too many incestuous relationships.

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2020/02/13/mapped-boris-johnson-s-g...

[ashtonkem]

It seems unreasonably charitable to assume that it’ll be used exclusively as a personal slush fund “eventually” and not “immediately”.

[LinuxBender]

In the U.S. everything is technically exempt from FOIA to a degree. Having gone through that process while I was in the military, I found many of the loopholes. The obvious ones are that the answer can be "Classified" or "Decline to answer" or in my case, the answer can be boxes and boxes of paperwork that is worded so vague that it may as well not have existed. No idea if this is the same in the U.K. Is there anyone from the U.K. here that has gone through the process?

[g_p]

There are many ways to prevent material being subject to FOI. Commercial confidence is one, classification/generic national security grounds is another. There are also some good reasons for this - in many cases, there are genuine commercial concerns.

This might be controversial, but it's very hard to have negotiations in good-faith with a company for services, and drive a hard bargain, if the company knows that the pricing offered to government can be FOI'd by a rival or other customer, to get granular price offered.

If you want to get the best value for money, and get below list price, you need the ability to have a commercial negotiation, with the confidence that granular pricing information (i.e. emails with discounted price lists for government customers) aren't becoming public.

That's not to say the total amount spent should be kept secret, but if exact breakdowns of unit pricing were going to be made public, it would likely cost the public more in the inability of government to negotiate around price with suppliers (or rather their unwillingness to enter into such negotiations)

Similarly, any kind of serious negotiation needs to have secrecy - it's very hard in a practical sense to have a negotiation with a party that has to (or might be forced to) publish everything. The number of startups (and even larger companies) that do everything as price-on-request should show industry's willingness to see the kind of price tarnsparency that FOI would expose. And that would give the taxpayer poorer value for money in the long term.

[Nullabillity]

So, what can be done.. mandate pricing and contract transparency for everyone?

Your comment says more about the fucked-up state of industry than anything else (and the backwards regime that enables it).

[g_p]

Pricing transparency might be a sensible approach, but I imagine you'd need international agreement to do so in lock-step, to avoid unintended arbitrage between countries. Such a setup could also perhaps favour non-value-adding middlemen, who would be able to provide unit-price transparency for a product they don't manufacture, and therefore which has a meaningless SKU (reseller-001), that avoids impact on the ultimate seller.

Don't disagree about this being a wider issue, but it's hard to see how you ever force price parity, short of published price lists. But we still have "list price", and people will still negotiate discounts below that "list price". I imagine in the long run, even across industry, we'd just end up back where we're at right now, with opaque price reductions and rebates, and potentially that process ends up more corrupt, as it's less visible?

I don't know what the fix is, but I'm not sure it would be as easy as just requiring everyone to publish transparent pricing and go for pricing parity.

[Nullabillity]

Hence why I mentioned contract transparency. Don't just publish ideal lists, publish the contracts that actually end up being signed. That would also fix the obfuscating-middle-man problem (reseller-001 still needs to be defined somewhere).

[OJFord]

I haven't submitted one personally, but from knowing someone who has (and has received them) and reading Private Eye (satirical & investigative magazine here) I gather a more common/easily usable excuse this side of the pond is 'commercial sensitivity'.

[rusk]

and heavy redaction

I’ve also seen fees being used which is technically legal and is supposed to be a reasonable administrative charge but can be multiplied by the number of subjects involved for instance.

[uncledave]

I dunno. Sounds like a fun environment to work in and accidentally leave an S3 bucket open :)

[omginternets]

Genuine question: why did DARPA work?

[mikeyouse]

If people are genuinely curious, this is the best explanation I've seen of why DARPA worked:

https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw

> The Advanced Research Projects Agency model is of an organization set up to maximize the agency and effectiveness of world-class program managers (PMs) who coordinate external research to midwife technology that wouldn’t otherwise happen (Programs.)

> The model has changed over time, but has still produced outlier results over time so it is worth paying attention to modern DARPA with more focus on informal process than formal process. PMs need specific characteristics to succeed: thinking for themselves, curiosity, low ego, vision, and ability to act under uncertainty. PMs also need to be trustworthy because the model depends on their ability to deploy funds quickly and redeploy them as needed. These PMs have temporary tenures, which enables idea turnover, aligns incentives, and enables DARPA to hire people it wouldn’t otherwise be able to. It’s worth deeply thinking about PM motivations because they are so core to the model.

> Organizationally, DARPA is tiny, flat, and opaque. It is set up to combine bottom-up and top down approaches through different-scale feedback loops. It is more ideas limited than money limited. DARPA’s project design and execution framework boils down to first showing that a precise technological vision is not impossible, then showing that it is possible, and finally making it possible. On top of many tacit tools, PMs execute on these steps by building focused networks and using seedling projects to derisk assumptions during a <$1.5m exploratory tranche before presenting a program design to an advisory group to the director known as the tech council.

> DARPA provides a critical ‘in-between’ role in the world. It facilitates cross-polination and derisks wacky ideas for both private, academic, and government organizations.

[omginternets]

Wonderful! Thank you for this!

[rusk]

Blank cheques