Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

I sat and stared at that screenshot of Internet Quorum for about five minutes with a mixture of shock and despair.

I'm a user experience designer. I started my career in the mid '90s, trying to turn green-screen DOS applications into GUIs without letting things like Internet Quorum be the result. I've been fighting the good fight for fifteen years.

With that one screenshot, I felt like the whole thing had been for naught. I literally got a chill up my spine as I sat there, thinking about the stifling, bureaucratic, inflexible DMV mindset that led to an abomination like that, and realizing that even at the highest levels of government, that's what it's like.

Our entire government, from municipal planning offices up to the top levels of the Pentagon, Congress, or even the White House, lives in this world of We've Always Done It This Way and You'll Need The Proper Authorization For That.

I mean, I knew this all along, but somehow seeing that screenshot - http://www.intranetquorum.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/featu... - it hit me in a visceral way I hadn't thought about in a long time.

All these years in corporate and startup America put me in a world where the need to move faster and compete has led me to believe that things had changed since the beginning of my career. In the world I live in, they have. But I had forgotten that in many places, things haven't changed much at all.

Of course I'm upset and fuming at the massive bloated waste that is our government, and I wish we could just put on our Guy Fawkes masks and wipe it clean in one easy swoop.

Clay Johnson is right, though. We need to learn how Congress works, make better tools, get our own lobbyists to educate the dinosaurs that are there now, and get new people into office who know more about the world we live in.

It's a daunting proposition.

Am I really alone in thinking that the Internet Quorum UI isn't really that bad?

Before my startup days I spent years working for the local government, and before that for a large (formerly public) gas pipelining company. I've seen so many horrendous Access/VBA-based frontends, or worse, Excel spreadsheets with macros that this system doesn't seem so bad.

In a way I'm actually surprised that Congress even has system to collate all the emails, letters, phone calls and visits into one single database. That sounds really useful, and I'd love to hear from someone that has actually used it.

"this world of We've Always Done It This Way and You'll Need The Proper Authorization For That."

I don't think this is the product of "We've Always Done It This Way", it's the result of "We Have A Strict Budget For This And User Interface Is Difficult To Quantify". As for "You'll Need The Proper Authorization For That.", well, that's the stuff of government. I agree that it's overly restrictive, but I wouldn't want to see the government tip too far in the opposite direction.

I'd be all for donning a Guy Fawkes mask and changing the world if there was even the slightest assurance that the system replacing it would be better. I don't think there is.

I'd be all for donning a Guy Fawkes mask and changing the world if there was even the slightest assurance that the system replacing it would be better. I don't think there is.

Bravo - this is going in my quotefile.

Am I really alone in thinking that the Internet Quorum UI isn't really that bad?

No, not at all.

My first thought when I saw it was that it's actually pretty clear and straightforward as far as interfaces go, the only real difference between that and the type of Web 2.0 interface that people use today is probably a 100 line style sheet to make it look less 1995 and a conversion to use AJAX requests instead of full page reloads.

Then again, "just" probably means quite a bit of work in the case of converting to AJAX requests, if the code that generates these pages looks anything like I imagine it does...

>I'd be all for donning a Guy Fawkes mask and changing the world if there was even the slightest assurance that the system replacing it would be better. I don't think there is.

The only argument against this is a statistical one, akin to how entropy works: One should engage in revolution only when the set of likely worse systems is larger than the set of likely better systems. (I could probably state this better if I knew more mathematical terminology; I suspect matrices are involved.)

Obviously in the US you haven't reached that point. Yet.

You don't really need matrix terminology - just a bit of economic theory and an understanding of basic statistics.

Essentially, you want to measure the 'quality' of each outcome (utility), and the likelihood of each outcome. Then, you calculate the expected utility (which is different from the utility of the expected value - you apply the function before taking the dot product, not afterwards).

I'm blanking on the TeX at the moment, but you basically take the sum of p(i)*U(I), where p(i) is the probability of the i-th outcome occuring, and U(I) is the utility ('benefit') associated with the i-th outcome. Utility is unique to a monotonically increasing function, so that means the individual values are arbitrary, as long as the relative order is preserved.

Then, see if that expected utility is better than the status quo. (Of course, this assumes that you already have a well-defined utility function, which is easy in theory but hard in practice).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_utility_hypothesis

Thank you for that. I cannot upvote enough. This subthread, with its heady blend of mathematics, philosophy and violent uprising is why I keep coming back to hacker news.

As someone who has interacted with the government quite a bit,I think your post comes across as ignorant. I don't mean that in an insulting way, but rather simply that it's obvious you have not interacted with the offices of your federal elected officials much.

There is a major difference between the bureaucracies of the executive agencies (think DoD $100 hammers), and the political and office staff of members of Congress. Political campaigns are basically startups, and most campaign and Congressional office staff are in their 20s or 30s. They are not scared of technology, and (especially in the House), they are intensely focused on competing every day.

On the other hand, realize that they are working within a system of government whose #1 goal is to make sure that every law gets fully considered. It's built slow on purpose. The value of this is evident every time an opposition is able to slow down or stop a bad law.

I think you might be overreacting a little bit in feeling sad about that screenshot. Sure it's ugly but it might be quite powerful. Large organisations need systems that control their business processes. They even need systems that control the changes to their business processes. There's no way to delegate responsibility without some form of beauracracy. P.S. Please show other better screenshots to inspire us.

Would you explain whats wrong with that UI?

Could you with your skills fit more information and ability to change it that fast in that amount of space? I doubt it.

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