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Comment by mljoe | Hacker News Reader

How do you suppose we fix this? I'm not being factious here.

I’d start with asking the questions: who was responsible for the contract and it’s implemntation, and what were their motives, incentives, qualifications and abilities. Then I would ask the same question, but what would the IDEAL motives, abilities, incentives and qualifications of that person be? Then try bridging those gaps....

be much more aggressive about sharing solutions between institutions or making them available as open source outright (see https://code.gov/#/).

How different can the needs from one DMV to another be?

Speaking from afar, but I've noticed that Americans tend to feel very strongly about state rights and independence, as well as the opportunity for someone to profit somewhere. Wouldn't that work against what you're saying?

I do think it makes complete sense though - reinventing the wheel in each state is crazy.

I wonder if any state agency has ever hired and built a solution internally, proven its effectiveness, and then somehow sold it to other states?

What you're saying is quite possibly true.

This is part of a bigger problem - it is just so hard to understand the internal structure, processes and needs of these organizations.

There must be some people on HN who have extensive government contracting experience and can shed a light on this?

Do you think this is a place where we could take notes from Estonia? X-Road[0] for example, they call their data exchange layer. I don't know exactly how it works, but it seems to specify some common protocol so various government (and private) services can all work together. I know their system is also very citizen focused, but perhaps something similar could reduce the costs of integrating the specific needs of specific state agencies with the overall set of services a state government provides/uses.

[0]https://www.ria.ee/en/x-road.html

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