The changes are pretty ridiculous [1], apparently the gobernment's devs kept deliberately renaming a specific header by adding and increasing a number at the end, from `xsrf-token` up to `xsrf-token11` [0], clearly only with the intend to break their rival free market app.<p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/oppnaskolplatt/status/1375052301182906373" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/oppnaskolplatt/status/137505230118290637...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/kolplattformen/embedded-api/commit/b611228ab4785f8de0c39dfdf1fea78522226c1c#diff-49d517a3c6653cb9108c98a12d14e99f9a88bb5bcbff83a07a9347ef75cfed7dR166" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kolplattformen/embedded-api/commit/b61122...</a>
It's amazing how often giant IT projects like these go off the rails. Exploding costs and garbage implementations. If you start the sentence with: "A 5+ year government IT project that cost over 100 million-" I already know how the story ends.<p>How do we improve this common scenario? What are the root causes?<p>The common themes are:<p>1. Lack of technical project competence at the decision maker level.<p>2. Scope creep. Where the one true system has to do everything.<p>3. A 'one-pass' approach where everything is expected to be delivered as a working system at the end of the project.<p>Even fixing two of these gives us a solid shot at a successful project.
"The city's local government, @Stockholmsstad, spent 1 billion Swedish crowns (100 million dollars)"<p>"@Stockholmsstad are now acting like angry toddlers."<p>I'd read between the lines. I don't think it's a hurt ego, not with these numbers. Someone is (continued) to be paid for this to be happening. This reeks corruption.
If open source advocates banded together and "sold" this story to local governments, there would never be these kinds of boondoggles. I'm reminded of the same thing that happened in Oregon. Oracle came in with a low ball price, then extracted hundreds of millions of dollars out of the state for a POS health care system.<p><a href="https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html</a>
>The city's local government, spent 1 billion Swedish crowns (100 million dollars) over 7 years to build a massive do-everything school IT platform, which students, teachers and parents are forced to use.
And their app is awful. Slow, buggy, almost unusable. One parent managed to access other people's private data, leading to @Stockholmsstad being fined for bad security.<p>where is juicy details like who did it? Oracle? IBM? ..?<p>> So a few parents decided, since the data is basically their data, to build their own better version. A couple of months later, @oppnaskolplatt was ready.<p>Bad precedent that must be squished ruthlessly. Otherwise next time they would decide to have their own better roads, police, government... that slippery slop of "we the people".
Government organizations are terrified about open source initiatives. There's something strange about it.<p>You could volunteer to do all the work and they'll still oppose you at every turn.<p>My hope is that we'll reach a stage where citizen participatory programming is normal for all. Where my dad could offer a PR to fix a typo on a government page casually as he browses it.<p>I have a feeling we're not far off but you need it to happen in a place with low entrenched interests but with sufficient enlightenment.<p>I think big US cities have the latter but not the former, and authoritarian developing nations lack both the former and the latter. So maybe smaller Western nations like Estonia.<p>Or, my biggest hope, sufficiently advanced townships in America.
The government's system sounds just like the "Ultranet" (as it was comically named) in Victoria, Australia a few years back which similarly aimed to be the one system to rule them all in government schools. Eventually went to the scrapheap (along with a few bureaucrats who were charged for corruption). During the tender process a few of us were toying with putting in a tender using Moodle, but glad we didn't waste our time as it was stitched up from the start.
This happens in every city in EU. Yesterday I was checking out the mandatory drone tracking solution of my city provided by a local supplier. Don't think it a network of radars connected to a surface-to-air-missile installation, no, a lame skin on google maps where you upload a flight plan based on a pdf you need to find for yourself on another website.
> You can understand why they arent keen to allow it to continue as its using BankID to authenticate. Would you install a 3rd party app to access your bank account?<p>Isn't that how Mint works?<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit_Mint" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit_Mint</a>
Perhaps the thing to do is to offer up the government project to an open source initiative.<p>"We need a school comms platform. It needs to have messaging and scheduling. People need to be authenticated (duh)."<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Sounds like a great way to get a community to build its own infrastructure?
Reminds me the old "war" between AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger. I think I recall that one the same day there was around 50 updates to those programs. Each update breaking something from the other and then one blinked and the stream of updates stopped and the 2 apps no longer spoke to each other.<p><a href="https://www.istartedsomething.com/20140420/msn-messenger-and-aim-instant-messenger-war-reverse-engineering-and-sabotage/" rel="nofollow">https://www.istartedsomething.com/20140420/msn-messenger-and...</a>
Not really sure what this platform contains, a backend, a site and an app?<p>It sounds like if I would get 1% of the price to build this, I would laugh all the way to the bank.
Exactly the same is happening in Hungary. There was a huge educational system developed for schools from extremely huge budget but both the backend and front-end is crap. There was an alternative front-end built similar to the Swedish way but they were forced to shut it down.
Government procurement is fundamentally broken, in the software world. The incentives of procurement seems to ensure that the worst software is produced, at a significantly greater cost than free alternatives. I blame this on the rise of administrative costs in the universities (which trickle into enterprise) and the inherent disagreeableness (with outsiders) amongst the price's law coalition.
IIUC, the open source app uses an unofficial/private api to communicate with the city’s application backend? Regardless of anything leading to the open source app being built, I struggle to take their side here.<p>Looking at the code, it appears that they authenticate against the api? So it’s a third-party app using an api, against the first-party’s expressed wishes, to read and/or manipulate student data?[1]<p>Of course the city will defend against that.<p>[1] Correct me if I’m wrong here.
While I love the David vs Goliath here, I'm going to point out the thing that open source folks just love to fluff over:<p>Who is going to maintain that app over time?<p>Maintenance sucks and is expensive.<p>I'm going through this right now with a security system for a non-profit. The old system is open source and works--but it's 10 years dead.<p>So, they'd like to add these couple features. Who is going to develop that? Who is going to pay for that? What happens 10 years from now?<p>So, they can pay money for a commercial solution which is "Somebody Else's Problem(tm)" or they can go with a bespoke system that becomes <i>their</i> problem.<p>Maintenance is a cost that open source never accounts for.