How Local Governments Got Hooked on One Company's Janky Software

The problem is that these companies aren&#x27;t hooked on extensible open source software as they should be, on something that gets reused across towns. The problem space then ought to be limited to developing or configuring town-specific extensions to the open source software, plus the associated devops. As with anything else, the goal ought to be to morph the development problem into a configuration problem.<p>Switzerland recently made open source mandatory for the public sector. Whether it is mandatory or not in any geography, its use ought to be something to strive for, not only to maximize reuse, but also to achieve a higher quality result in the process.

My city uses an insane portal that most junior devs could probably replace with a week of hard work. It has massive security holes, uses unstyled HTML and doesn’t have a single convenience built in<p>I think these platforms just have a ton of features slapped together that barely function and have no thought given to UX, but they check whatever boxes their sales team need.

Thought this was about Microsoft..

Sounds about right. Maybe even typical. Every township has that one guy paying super close attention while contributing nothing other than pissing and moaning. If we really want to change local government software, we need to actually incentivise people to join up with anti merger clause on whatever grants we offer them.

Easy. Local governments have no resources. Companies like Tyler let them just add modules to whatever they are doing today.<p>My city uses a similar platform. The explosion of pickleball required a scheduling system. They were able to implement that system in a few days, although it sucks, it works.

Dupe: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41456577">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41456577</a>

We desperately need people to fill this role

Somehow this is not about Microsoft.

everybody in that space sucks.

Same in the UK

I&#x27;m paywalled is this about Granicus or Civic Plus?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Kpitn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Kpitn</a><p>&gt; But adapting the software to the state’s unique regulatory needs proved challenging<p>A good example that&#x27;s not taught in CompSci, generic software is an unsolved problem.<p>In a school environment we contracted someone to write room booking software (A while ago, don&#x27;t need a list of current solutions)<p>That&#x27;s crazy, in an environment that&#x27;s extremely similar across the worlds schools and also overlaps with non-school environments.<p>The &quot;unsolved problem&quot; has a lot of elements, bureaucratic, entropy, the value of differences.<p>But one thing we always see in these $100 million case studies is the government workers won&#x27;t have specced it properly, so blame will fall back.<p>The cost is surprising but accurate much as every noob could &quot;write it in a weekend&quot;, the fact it doesn&#x27;t work is tricky.