[lordnacho]

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 plenty of people in education who would want to do odd jobs on it.

Now maybe pay up for a few senior devs and a PM, so that someone is at least responsible for it, with their income tied to it. But make it a small group, for the same reason.

If there's suggestions, or something breaks, there's a place to report that. End of the day, it's a platform for the people by the people.

Sounds like a great way to get a community to build its own infrastructure?

[dmurray]

> 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.

There's a Cunningham's Law parallel here: the best way to get a good free open source system is to first build a terrible expensive proprietary one with shady business practices, and let the frustrated users do the rest.

[Cullinet]

I think you missed the part where large numbers of people are forced to use the bad system wasting time but only paid salaried time they're not too concerned about so that they'll spend even more of it complaining about the need for a replacement and extolling the virtues of any other system they'll never actually use, and the bit where you pay for lots of highly skilled experts to get the bad system running and doing the least of things for big organisations who think there's no alternative to spending huge budgets for employing the programmers who ultimately take all of this experience to exhort the open source developers what is really required for a successful and excellent replacement and become independent consultants paid by different big organisations to give advice on how the new open source software is going to solve all their problems and set up the teams and management required for adopting the new open software, whilst the open source developers listen to these voices and target unrealistically difficult features and architecture and never get around to noticing that the only thing that anyone actually wanted done was the few really basic tasks that just happened to be too difficult to implement in the original badly conceived product.

[machiaweliczny]

That would work if code was reqired to be OSS.

[core-questions]

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 little bit fun and whimsical, being not-for-profit, compared to working on something dry and corporate.

[Cullinet]

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.

[core-questions]

Is this some GPT-3 spam or does it just read like it?

[lordnacho]

Yeah, it's not gonna happen at ant scale soon. Quite simply the bureaucracy is trained to buy things from big businesses. They're the last people to know anything about how technology works, and can't be convinced by anything other than the authority of brand names.

I'd love it if we lived in a society where everyone could contribute to everything. You see a bug, you report it on the board, someone says "hey I don't have time but you can look at it, it's gonna be in myscript.py". You fix it, they check your fix, and we're all better off.

Having an army of kids doing it would help everyone. I think working on a real thing instead of a contrived project is huge in the development of coders.

And as you say, they can add their owm imprint. Society has got to renew itself somehow, and it's not by being corporate.

[core-questions]

Yeah, 100%. People underestimate what "kids" can do - especially when we're talking about 14+ year olds who have been using technology their whole lives. Giving them the opportunity to work on Something Real might be more appealing than a bullshit project that goes nowhere.

> I'd love it if we lived in a society where everyone could contribute to everything.

That's still the dream, but SaaS kills open source in many ways - by monetizing what has already been done for people other than the authors, and by locking all applications behind paywalls. A return to running our own decentralized software, a return to protocols instead of platforms, is what we need to get over this.

[Cullinet]

bureaucracies are beautifully animated things to watch if you look for the incredible ways they'll self heal and react to negate any kind of threat to their preferred definition of their own integrity.

[Toutouxc]

> Heck, you could probably get free work from the kids themselves. There's plenty of people in education who would want to do odd jobs on it.

> Now maybe pay up for a few senior devs and a PM.

> platform for the people by the people

I think you're overestimating the abilities of "kids" and non-professional devs and underestimating the complexity of running that kind of show (thus underestimating the ratio of professionals/community necessary to pull that off). Notice how most successful open-source projects are in fact supported by tech companies and worked on by professional devs on those companies' payrolls, and how, despite that, most open-source projects still end up kind of chaotic.