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Comment by momothereal | Hacker News Reader

Looks like this is being done under contract/partnership with 18F (GSA): https://18f.gsa.gov/

> The fundamental problem that we’ve observed is that weather.gov reflects its organizational silos (Conway's Law) more than its users’ needs. A lack of overall strategy, feedback/monitoring, and tools have perpetuated this problem.

Wow, my org would not have the guts to write that down in a public README!

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US Digital Service and 18F have done a huge service by normalizing the ability for agencies to say, "Heh, this sucks, but we're going to make it better." That safety is half the battle, otherwise there is no incentive for stakeholders to put their guard down and collaborate on a cohesive solution ("bureaucracy hacking").

Building trust and relationships is an underrated component of these transformation efforts.

I wish more groups would be as transparent.

Silos happen. I'm not willing to spread blame. I will aside some of my frustration if I know it's an acknowledged problem and there's willingness to address it.

I've found the problem with transparency and any sort of acknowledgement of problems in business, is that there too many other people whoa are all too willing to say, "We're awesome, just leave it to us!" And these are usually the teams that have the biggest problems and rely on silos to prevent others from seeing how bad it is.

> feedback/monitoring

This makes me worried that they're going to add some "analytics" tracking scripts in there that come with those damned annoying cookie pop-ups.

They actually have an in-house solution for this: https://analytics.usa.gov/ (though based on Google Analytics)

Details here: https://digital.gov/guides/dap/common-questions-about-dap/

AFIAK, EU privacy law have provision for exemption to foreign governments bodies.

So, no cookie popup

I go to weather.gov often and have actually filled out one of their pop up surveys. I suspect thats the feedback.

It still seems like there is quite a bit of siloing, though. The Office of Water Prediction for example runs its own GitHub org, has its own sites separate from water.weather.gov at preview.water.noaa.gov and again at water.noaa.gov/map, but all their field observations actually come from the USGS who host data and web services at waterdata.usgs.gov.

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