Neat. Curious: What's your stance on open-sourcing all civic infrastructure, like Healthcare.gov?
Open-sourcing hasn't cultivated much in the way of public engagement with the projects, but it's done a lot in terms of making development easier for the range of contractors + VA employees we have, and (IMO) nudged toward better decision-making with the underlying knowledge that everything we do is publicly viewable.
Other federal agencies routinely come to VA asking to learn from their digital modernization efforts, and I suspect the open-source stance has been a big part of that.
(I also work at Ad Hoc. It's great!)
[1] https://department-of-veterans-affairs.github.io/va.gov-team..., repository links at the bottom
> Open-sourcing hasn't cultivated much in the way of public engagement with the projects, but it's done a lot in terms of making development easier for the range of contractors + VA employees we have, and (IMO) nudged toward better decision-making with the underlying knowledge that everything we do is publicly viewable.
To gunsch v.
However, despite being a critical, successful piece of open source software that had massive investment over decades, it's being abandoned for a commercial system, Cerner, in a $16bn project.
https://ehrintelligence.com/news/va-cerner-implementation-co...
Why Cerner? I don't know.
It was a truly open source project within the VA with programmers customizing this national patient record software in cooperation with doctors (to meet their needs) locally and sharing the modifications nationally. Perhaps its greatest technical challenge (besides complexity arising from decades of evolution) was finding programmers to work with the MUMPS language that it was written in. FYI MUMPS is a language with an integral db -a concept which was out of vogue for some time.
Political challenges are another story[4].
[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/worldvista/ [2] https://www.hardhats.org/history/hardhats.html [3] https://worldvista.org/AboutVistA [4] https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/03/vista-computer...
In my opinion none of them were capable of designing a user facing application. It was also built as a client/server desktop application. Not really a good choice in my opinion. Sure there were no offline PWA at the time, but by contrast if your SAP backend dies all the local applications in a hospital e.g. writing the release report also dies.
Needless to say given it's immense complexity it was also impossible to use this monstrosity elsewhere.
But replacing it with Cerner in a $16bn project is just sad.
* Frontend - https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-websi...
* Backend - https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-cms...
Paul's company is working on this project too (whom I work alongside with but with a different company)!
The U.S. Digital Service is really a big factor in this, see the playbook, specifically play 13:
> If the codebase has not been released under an open source license, explain why.
source: https://playbook.cio.gov/#play13.
So, see how this is now flipped. It is now "hey, you need to open source this by default, and if not, you need to explain why you didn't." and not the other way around!
Update: See Andrew Gunsch's comment in this thread too!
A better approach might be to just budget for and pay a team of good developers a market wage to make it better.
“At the time of the Heartbleed attack, the OpenSSL website listed just 15 active developers, most of whom contributed to the project on a volunteer basis. But not all changes to the OpenSSL software are written by these 15 people. Rather, these developers help to filter and organize suggested changes from a larger community of people who make occasional contributions.”
https://www.vox.com/2014/6/19/18076318/heartbleed
If you want the government to have more competitive Federal salaries for developers then write your Senators.
As a note, I’ve seen some truly awful software written by highly paid devs, so, just paying more won’t necessarily fix the problem.
High pay is necessary, but not sufficient.
With high pay, you MAY get a good product — if you attract competent people on all levels.
With low pay, the mind-numbing godawfulness of the end result, if it's ever delivered, is practically guaranteed.
[ EDIT ] And, contra to your apparent contrasting of "open source" and "paid developers", gov.uk is both.
In this case it's the government which technically doesn't have to actually make money (budgets, tho), but it can work in non-governmental situations too. Maybe via consulting/support on the technology, grants/donations (OpenSSL, now), maybe just making it open to foster contributions and long-term maintenance[0]. Maybe the actual software isn't the company's main focus and open-sourcing the code is just a way of ensuring accountability and quality. IME, people are actually far more conscientious when they know they code/docs could be read by anyone for all time... even if it probably won't.
[0] I'll grant that this is probably quite rare. That's not the point... the point is that there are many potential reasons for open-sourcing.
https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/Resources
So paid developers work on, but the end result is publically avaliable.