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Comment by kylec | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a great opportunity for someone to develop an open source high-availability, fault-tolerant 911 dispatch system. Being able to get first responders where they're needed as fast as possible would provide a tremendous public good.

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This seems like a great opportunity for someone to develop an open source high-availability, fault-tolerant 911 dispatch system.

You're right! And then we can make a one-size-fits-all Retail Bank program that every bank will use. And a one-size-fits-all Policy Administration System for insurance companies. Once we've solved those problems we can move on to a one-size-fits-all Dispatch system for every company that has employees in the field.

Then we can wake up and realize that there's a reason why this hasn't happened in the last 50 years. Any system can accommodate maybe 80% of a particular niche's needs. But I'll be damned if you can get business users to agree on that final 20%. One says "black", the other says "white" and then you have some oddball that says, "potato."

And then there's the whole continent of minefields in regard to disparate devices, patents, trademarks, proprietary system interfaces, etc.

If you do take this on, best of luck to you - but don't quit your day job.

That's not how things work... You can't just create some system and see governments flock to you. There are years of consulting and specification requirements.

Linux is open source... Office Libre... Go convince a public office to switch to Ubuntu..

Saving money is often at the bottom of their focus.. and then you have competing interests releasing figures that show it is more costly to switch to free alternatives.

Public spending is a corrupt cycle.

>There are years of ...

Yes, First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Sorry, I know it's trite, but there's some truth there. Being ignored for years is not necessarily a reason not to do something. In some cases it's the very best reason to do it.

[EDIT] - would those people down-voting please explain why?

I don't see how you could develop such a system without partnership from some government. How would you test it?

Maybe you could partner with just one small government to start. Of all the municipalities in the world, you'd think at-least one would be open to the idea, even if in tandem.

Maybe it could be started by a person who works (or worked) at the dispatch center, and is also a programmer (there must be at-least one of those in the world too).

The point is that NYC laughing/ignoring/fighting you is not a good enough reason not to start. (and who's to say that NYC would do any of those things, given the current state of affairs)

Test it somewhere with a private sector need for such a service, like Detroit?

I downvoted you because you asked people to explain why they were downvoting you. This adds nothing to the conversation (everyone who gets downvoted wants to know why, everyone who downvotes knows that the person who they are downvoting would want to know why) and is bad for HN (talking about the moderation system distracts from actual on-topic conversation, and leads to gaming of the moderation system - indeed, I would say even that line can be gaming the moderation system, as it can lead people to reconsider whether to downvote).

On the contrary:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-03/25/ubuntu-china

As a proof of concept goes, the world's most populous country is pretty good.

And for a tiny fraction of $88 million. There's something about throwing such a large amount of money at a project that causes it to bloat into failure.

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