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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Cost efficiency is like jumbo shrimp when it comes to government and you as the customer. OK, this website is now "profitable" charging x for y. Well, its not like Y was produced out of thin air beforehand. The taxpayer always pays. Its in the name. A system like this merely moves where the point of sale happens from one point in the stream to another. It's not any more profitable than what came before really, especially considering all this "profit" effectively is shot into the sun out of the system as it enters booze allens checkbooks instead of having it go back into the public purse.

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Surely it’s a question of which tax payers. Is it the tax payers using national parks (and entering lotteries or making reservations) or all tax payers? Charging for service also allows non-tax payers to contribute too.

I’m not saying I’m for either approach but I still the cost efficiency is orthogonal to how it’s funded.

If it were more transparent how much Booz were making, and how much web traffic, reservations, lottery entries, etc they were dealing with then the reasonable profit overhead for their work could be more easily be understood by the public.

> Surely it’s a question of which tax payers. Is it the tax payers using national parks (and entering lotteries or making reservations) or all tax payers? Charging for service also allows non-tax payers to contribute too.

The thing is they aren't contributing to anything but booze allen hamiltons bottom line. None of this money goes into the parks department. Them taking a "reasonable profit overhead" amounts to parasitic loss. There's no magic sauce with web development, plenty of people understand it. This can be done in house at cost just as easily as its done in booze allen hamilton's house.

Experience with government sites tells me otherwise.

I use plenty of good government sites. I think pubmed is an example of how powerful a site can be when its designed purely for function versus advertising. You can do all sorts of interesting operations both in search and with an accompanying command line utility that directly interfaces with the database. There's probably a higher percentage of "bad" private sites than bad government sites imo.

I have never used a site built by the government that I would say is anywhere close to as good as recreation.gov

Yet here we are in a thread about how this website is facing lawsuits so I don't think its a great success.

As both a web dev and a parks lover... have you tried to use the agencies' own sites much? Even for a flagship park like Yosemite (https://www.nps.gov/yose/index.htm), it's hard to figure out how the different permits work. They're way down the page, requires going through several similar-sounding pages, all to no obvious next step. Even something as basic as having clear calls-to-action aren't there.

And figuring out where to go in the park... what's the difference between Plan Your Visit and Things to Do and Places to See? Why is it so hard to get a cohesive map that shows not just where to sleep but also the best places to visit and the recommended driving/hiking routes? What's the difference between a standard map, a brochure map, a simple map, a park map, and a valley map? Why aren't road closures and other alerts reflected on the maps?

Why doesn't the Fees page talk about permit or camping fees at all?

Which areas of the park are reservation-only, which are permitted, which are first-come-first serve?

These are just basic examples I pulled off one site. Most NP sites are like that. And remember this is for Yosemite, one of the country's (if not the world's) most visited tourist destinations, and they couldn't even do basic UX well. This isn't for a lack of knowledge (the on-the-ground rangers are awesome! talk to one next time before you venture forth!), but digital isn't a priority to them. It's not even an afterthought. It's more often than not "oh, I don't know how that works or who works on it or who pays for it".

Before Recreation.gov and ReserveAmerica before it, digital efforts WERE often done in-house, to disastrous effect. Even now, you will usually find better visitor's guides and resources outside of official NPS sites, like on Alltrails or random blogs or "best of" lists.

There is no magic sauce in web development, but it does take a particular type of agency to be able to make good pages with a focus on the end-user. Maybe to you and I such a site is relatively simple to set up. But that is NOT the NPS's strong suit at all, and it would be a forever uphill battle to convince their administrators and the Department of Interior and Congress to focus on usability. I doubt many of them have ever tried to book their own reservation.

Many of their parks don't even run their own restaurants and lodging[1] (which any tourist destination usually would), but you expect them to do well running a multi-agency, multi-site, multi-rule booking system? It's just not practical given the current staffing and skillset.

[1] If you think outsourcing to Booz is bad, yeesh, the hospitality concessionaires like Aramark are even worse. Talk about overpriced and poor quality =/

>There is no magic sauce in web development, but it does take a particular type of agency to be able to make good pages with a focus on the end-user. Maybe to you and I such a site is relatively simple to set up. But that is NOT the NPS's strong suit at all, and it would be a forever uphill battle to convince their administrators and the Department of Interior and Congress to focus on usability. I doubt many of them have ever tried to book their own reservation.

This is exactly why the private option is just as bad as the apathetic public one: in the end they are the same end result of a less than optimal ui/ux because they come from the same underlying issue of an administration that prefers to either not deal with it appropriately or toss the hot potato to someone else to take the blame of not dealing with it appropriately.

I still stand behind my stance that its not impossible to make a good website in house, and that bringing in outside profiteers is always a mistake compared to hiring those same exact project managers with those same exact visions for the website on an internal basis.

But in the end they are not the same result. Recreation.gov is way better than what the agencies tried to do individually, in-house, before. This isn't a hypothetical, it's the actual historical pathway we went through to arrive at this point. Our shitty public option, where it existed at all, was thankfully replaced by a much superior centralized public-private partnership.

Those exact same project managers probably would never have wanted to work directly for the NPS to begin with, dealing with government clearances and pay scales and bureaucracies for what, maybe half to 70% of their private-sector pay? I'm currently job-hunting for a public-sector web dev job and it's not easy to jump through their hoops, and that's for someone who's purposely seeking them out. Would a less civically-minded PM even bother?

Good web development isn't just about code, but largely culture, a sort of user-focused product culture that's hard enough to find in tech proper, harder still in government. Congress doesn't even THINK about these issues, much less try to put out good requirements for them. It's easier for them to sign a check (or a rent-seeking agreement) than to spin up what would basically amount to a new digital agency from scratch (which I actually think would be a great idea, like what the United States Digital Service is tasked with)... but that takes time to get off the ground. In the meantime Recreation.gov (and ReserveAmerica before it) have served the public well for the last decade or so, at the expense of some minor taxpayer dollars -- still much more bang for the buck than we get out of a typical war or panicked pandemic response, or housing Secret Service agents at private resorts or whatever.

If and when our government improves, then yes, we should in-house essential and basic services like web development. But our government doesn't seem to be improving on that front, and efforts to push it forward (like a Green New Deal) faltered. The current administration did manage to push through a lot of infrastructure dollars, but it remains to be seen whether that'll pay off (and whether it can survive the next Republican administration). Fingers crossed... but until then, god damn it, let me have my easily reserved campsites, please, if only so I can get away once in a while without having to think about how shitty the government is!

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