The FOI part means this is dead on arrival and will be abused all ends up.
For this to work you need the public to understand why DARPA worked. Hiding details of failures makes that impossible (and again, completely open to corruption).
For this to work you need the public to understand why DARPA worked. Hiding details of failures makes that impossible (and again, completely open to corruption).
https://www.theweek.co.uk/951989/what-next-for-dominic-cummi...
Perhaps it hit a raw nerve or two.
It wasn't widely reported in the mainstream media, but it drew attention via Byline Times. Similarly, the Tufton Street gang, with the same cast of characters, whose tentacles also reach across the Atlantic, will never be featured as comprehensively by the MSM; far too many incestuous relationships.
https://www.desmog.co.uk/2020/02/13/mapped-boris-johnson-s-g...
I’ve also seen fees being used which is technically legal and is supposed to be a reasonable administrative charge but can be multiplied by the number of subjects involved for instance.
This might be controversial, but it's very hard to have negotiations in good-faith with a company for services, and drive a hard bargain, if the company knows that the pricing offered to government can be FOI'd by a rival or other customer, to get granular price offered.
If you want to get the best value for money, and get below list price, you need the ability to have a commercial negotiation, with the confidence that granular pricing information (i.e. emails with discounted price lists for government customers) aren't becoming public.
That's not to say the total amount spent should be kept secret, but if exact breakdowns of unit pricing were going to be made public, it would likely cost the public more in the inability of government to negotiate around price with suppliers (or rather their unwillingness to enter into such negotiations)
Similarly, any kind of serious negotiation needs to have secrecy - it's very hard in a practical sense to have a negotiation with a party that has to (or might be forced to) publish everything. The number of startups (and even larger companies) that do everything as price-on-request should show industry's willingness to see the kind of price tarnsparency that FOI would expose. And that would give the taxpayer poorer value for money in the long term.
Your comment says more about the fucked-up state of industry than anything else (and the backwards regime that enables it).
Don't disagree about this being a wider issue, but it's hard to see how you ever force price parity, short of published price lists. But we still have "list price", and people will still negotiate discounts below that "list price". I imagine in the long run, even across industry, we'd just end up back where we're at right now, with opaque price reductions and rebates, and potentially that process ends up more corrupt, as it's less visible?
I don't know what the fix is, but I'm not sure it would be as easy as just requiring everyone to publish transparent pricing and go for pricing parity.
https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw
> The Advanced Research Projects Agency model is of an organization set up to maximize the agency and effectiveness of world-class program managers (PMs) who coordinate external research to midwife technology that wouldn’t otherwise happen (Programs.)
> The model has changed over time, but has still produced outlier results over time so it is worth paying attention to modern DARPA with more focus on informal process than formal process. PMs need specific characteristics to succeed: thinking for themselves, curiosity, low ego, vision, and ability to act under uncertainty. PMs also need to be trustworthy because the model depends on their ability to deploy funds quickly and redeploy them as needed. These PMs have temporary tenures, which enables idea turnover, aligns incentives, and enables DARPA to hire people it wouldn’t otherwise be able to. It’s worth deeply thinking about PM motivations because they are so core to the model.
> Organizationally, DARPA is tiny, flat, and opaque. It is set up to combine bottom-up and top down approaches through different-scale feedback loops. It is more ideas limited than money limited. DARPA’s project design and execution framework boils down to first showing that a precise technological vision is not impossible, then showing that it is possible, and finally making it possible. On top of many tacit tools, PMs execute on these steps by building focused networks and using seedling projects to derisk assumptions during a <$1.5m exploratory tranche before presenting a program design to an advisory group to the director known as the tech council.
> DARPA provides a critical ‘in-between’ role in the world. It facilitates cross-polination and derisks wacky ideas for both private, academic, and government organizations.