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Comment by hodwik2 | Hacker News Reader

A number of African nations are currently struggling with this -- attempting to bootstrap nationwide networking from zero, while having economies which are very much command economies (although in Africa, that's due to corruption, rather than being baked into the law).

In one small African nation the government was intensely interested in building a national system for finding lost cows. (This was a much-touted presidential initiative.) Basically, farmers would be able to text their cow's ID and the system would tell them if another farmer had found it.

In spite of the simplicity of such a system, it took them years of 'research and development', and enormous budgets spent, for a system which they discovered in the end, didn't work. It turned out, they couldn't figure out how to procure and install a server for it to run on.

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>It turned out, they couldn't figure out how to procure and install a server for it to run on.

Sure they could. There's talent abound in Africa. Unfortunately, the case here is usually corruption. That project money was siphoned to the politicians themselves or a connected pal, or both. Just old fashioned fraud here. I think "Africans don't know what they are doing" is a convenient scapegoat that empowers fraudsters. And if that narrative leads to more foreign aid, then wonderful, because the politically connected class abuse that too.

Oh, I'm glad you know more than I do about this thing I lived through, so you could correct me on it.

Western developed economies are quite capable of doing this, such as the Canadian gun registry which somehow managed to spend billions of dollars without achieving anything.

CGI, which built the registry, is the parent company of CGI Federal, known lately for the Obamacare site.

Let me guess... they're absurdly well connected though?

You don't get large federal contracts without being well-connected.

And this sub-thread is one, if tiny and partial, solution. Sunlight (public knowledge and understanding), bleaching out such stains. I appreciate the pointers.

And... we shouldn't let these people simply re-organize under new names.

Just as I'm likely to look askance at anyone with Goldman Sachs in their resume. Only, I prefer to know and respond more specifically.

And before that they were known for bungling a healthcare exchange for Canada's CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services).

I guess the US took them because they had experience in the field?

Off topic of course. The gun registry was very political and had many people who wanted it to fail. Then it did fail. I always wondered if the two were related.

Then again, it could've failed simply because it was brought to you by the makers of healthcare.gov

(well, I guess the firearms registry was first, but you get the idea about the creators)

And despite this immense failure, in Québec we are looking to do it all over again.

sigh

Shouldn't Twillio, digital ocean and one small bespoke node app be able to do it?

If half of them would work outside of the US, people would already be happy. DO’s usability goes down a lot if you don’t have a credit card (you literally pay to be able to pay), and Twilio is quite similar.

It's not about what needs to be done, it's about finding reliable people to do it, especially when there's all sorts of opportunities for people to funnel it to a "preferred bidder".

The government was immensely paranoid about it, insisting it had to run on site, and be completely configurable by their tech staff, who were not themselves engineers.

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