[matthewdgreen]

Look, good websites are great. I’m glad you’re happy with the experience. But building good websites is not some special capability that should entitle you to large fractions of ongoing revenue from customers. Building decent websites in 2023 should be a competitive fee-for-delivery service, even for websites that have specialized functionality and large scale like auctions. Someone should pay you a (potentially large!) fee for building it and an ongoing maintenance/support fee. Nobody should be entitled to collect a huge rent amounting to any substantial fraction of all national park recreational fees just because they built some infrastructure, any more than the people who paved the roads leading to the national parks should be allowed to collect tolls on every driver passing through.

If your response is that websites are so hard to build that our government can’t spec out its requirements and get it built — and therefore just need to overpay by 10,000x for the privilege of having a decent user experience, then maybe we (technologists) need to go have a long look in the mirror and ask what we’ve done to make things so terrible.

[bombcar]

It's much more likely that the government agency in charge of this had $4.99 to build the site, not even enough for Fivver.

But they have all the latitude in the world to sign "portion of the ticket price" contracts, and so they did.

It's not Booz's fault; it's the situation that lead this to (apparently) be the best option for the agency.

(This same crowd here wouldn't even turn over in their sleep if the same agency had contracted out building the site and ran it themselves on AWS and paid Amazon 3-5x what Booz is getting, mind you.)

[matthewdgreen]

It is perfectly fine to diagnose the pathology that led to this outcome. It is not ok for people to excuse it because “the website works fine for me!” Government agencies need an interface to communicate with taxpayers and “customers” in order to exist. In the 1960s that meant paper mail and customer service agents, and most government agencies were reasonably competent (if sluggish) at handling those technologies. In 2023 and beyond it means smoothly-working websites, and governments have decided to treat these as a weird, expensive mystery technology - long past the point where industry has made website design into something routine. The days when governments could budget $5 to agencies for tech development and/or expect them to spend 50x standard industry prices on broken government contractors are long behind us. And there is no room for this kind of predatory outsourcing. We need to demand a lot better.

[freeopinion]

Even if we see things as charitably as you outline (and well done for that) the contract could be a "portion of the ticket sales up to $X total."

I don't blame Booz for that (entirely). Somebody else had to sign that contract, too.

But if I'm going to lay into Booz, I have to look in the mirror myself. I have worked for employers that charge as much as they can get away with in a market that wasn't exactly fair. When incumbents spend almost unbelievable amounts to build a functioning legislative mote, then exploit that for all it's worth, you could call that "good business." And you can rationalize by saying, "If I don't, somebody else will, so it might as well be me who benefits." But the excuses seem pretty flimsy when historians catalog the damages.

Still, the biggest blame goes to the other signature on the contract.

[bloppe]

I agree it's "not Booz's fault". That's the point of honest graft. It's the fault of our government for allowing them to have so much control over these junk fees.

Still a problem.

[mindslight]

> building good websites is not some special capability that should entitle you to large fractions of ongoing revenue from customers

Dangerous words on a forum that's focused on the nouveau middlemen of Surveillance Valley.

[genericresponse]

I would argue that the cost is less in setting up than in running and maintaining a site at the scale of Recreation.gov. That includes aspects of customer support.

Many of these agencies are forced into uncompetitive compensation structures which means contracting out most, if not all, of their technical work.

A major part of the issue is the government contracting system. In an attempt at fairness, it has massive amounts of oversight burden. That is, in turn, a barrier to additional competition for the work.