[jowiar]

> That said, obviously they should have brought in the campaign website team...

That's called cronyism, and, for the most part, it's either against the law, or will get you destroyed in the media. One of the biggest challenges in government is that, for those of us in startup-land, the process goes something like: "I need to hire someone, I'll call my friend who I know does good work". You can't really do that in the government, or everyone who isn't your friend won't be happy.

The standard federal contracting route is certainly a mess as well. The underlying belief that everything can be reduced to a series of checkboxes, and whoever can check the boxes the cheapest wins leads to a disaster.

Hopefully, one of the outcomes of all of this is we rethink how the government software (and other sorts of procurement) process is done.

[cynusx]

Procurement process design is not only a problem in public bodies, there is a lot of corruption in private companies as well where a procurement person would strike a deal with a sales person. This deal can range from "a nice watch" to "I like a swimming pool", depending on the contract value.

That said, I also think that the current procurement methods are broken and that a less rigorous procurement process would eliminate contractors that specialise in government procurement.

One way would be to implement a randomised audit where the deal would be re-examined and the procurement officer would have to defend every choice he made. if 5% of the deals were audited then bad actors would be caught very rapidly.

An other approach would be to adapt the jury-trial approach to government procurement and have them review every procurement contract.

Third approach would be to combine this to reduce the workload.

[jbooth]

All true. That being said, they got destroyed in the media anyways.