[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.