$18M Being Spent to Redesign Recovery.gov Web Site | Hacker News Reader

$18M Being Spent to Redesign Recovery.gov Web Site

blogs.abcnews.com

20 pointslunaru18 comments

Misleading headline, go read the RFP. It's a major multi-year project that includes 24/7 support (for years!). They are funneling in data from thousands of sources and trying to automate it. Plus have it searchable in a very public way. Hosted in multiple data centers. etc etc. To make it sound like they want a new template is simply incorrect.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/16515421/RAT-Board-Solicitation

The bulk of the development work has to be done very quickly too, which vastly complicates things.

Misleading headline, go read the RFP

Misleading article! ABC news is messed up if they think this is nearly enough info and it suggests that the government is wasting money. $18 mil is nothing, a single F-22 aircraft costs $361 mil and there's more than one of those being built/deployed...

Indeed, every report I've heard about this story has been misleading. "I know how to make websites, why don't they send me $18m?" Politics is so frustrating sometimes.

18 million is still way high for that.

Fact is, there's a huge open source community that would do 90% of that work for free in order to get their names on a high profile project like that.

It only takes a few pages of reading the RFP to start seeing the rampant waste. They'll be purchasing Sybase, Oracle, and MS SQL Server for the project. Why all three? That's likely 100s of thousands of dollars right there.

Also, why are they contracting this out? Why not hire a small team, and release in stages via some agile project management techniques?

I doubt this is a big deal in the grand scheme of things however its the sort of thing that sort of reminds you that no matter who is in power, things run the same way in Washington.

> Fact is, there's a huge open source community that would do 90% of that work for free in order to get their names on a high profile project like that.

A naive and unworkable strategy at best.

As a major open source developer and project leader I've come believe that the majority of relevant open source works comes from a tiny, motivated, and highly skilled minority. And remember, OSS developers don't work for free because they want their name on some product or webpage. There are jobs for that, and they even pay.

You should have put in a bid then. Could have made some "easy" coin for a month's work. Only three of 59 approved vendors decided to bid which speaks for itself.

> It only takes a few pages of reading the RFP to start seeing the rampant waste. They'll be purchasing Sybase, Oracle, and MS SQL Server for the project. Why all three? That's likely 100s of thousands of dollars right there.

The actual text says that the government would prefer to leverage servers and licenses they already have and those include Sybase, Oracle, MySQL and MS SQL Server. Other databases are allowed to be proposed, but must be included in the cost (including support for the duration of the contract). The existing site uses MySQL so they are not opposed to open source.

Looks like it's being done by http://www.smartronix.com

Let's hope it turns out better than their site, which doesn't look that great (to me), uses Flash, doesn't validate, and doesn't degrade gracefully when JS is disabled.

Yeah, having

  <A CLASS="dnn_dnnmenu_ctldnnmenu_spmitm MainMenu_MenuItem" HREF="javascript:__doPostBack('dnn$dnnMENU$ctldnnMENU','53')" STYLE="text-decoration: none;" TITLE="">
    <FONT CLASS="dnn_dnnmenu_ctldnnmenu_spmbar dnn_dnnmenu_ctldnnmenu_spmitm MainMenu_MenuItem MainMenu_MenuBar" STYLE="">
      ABOUT US
    </FONT>
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in your portfolio really says something. But judging by "Smartronix Awarded FAA National Airspace System Modernization Program in Alaska" and "Smartronix Unveils the Rugged USB Hub", it looks like their specialty is enduring the government procurement process, not web publishing.

Which doesn't make me feel any better.

It usually takes a large established firm with a government contract record to get a winning bid. They in turn outsource parts to contractors (with preference to minority and veteran owned firms). They are most likely just the project coordinators.

And each level of indirection increases the quality of the ultimate delivery?

Makes it easier to deal with that large amount of data there is. As long as the overall objective is clear ("enhance government transparency with structured public data") then it's not a huge problem to sub-contract it.

It's not indirection, it's delegation. A single company cannot handle all the political departments and regional divisions on its own.

None of the subcontractors could do the job themselves, so having one firm manage the contract may be fairly efficient. Much easier than sending out RFPs for 20 different tasks on the same project and then having to get them to all work together nicely.

Right. this time around, Smartronix are working with one of the firms who spoke to the Sunlight Foundation about doing the 'right thing' - talk to #transparency on freenode and @cjoh on twitter.

I think there's lots of reasons to believe this project might work, and it's seen as being fairly cheap- the rest of the bids were in the 50-60MM range.

Or how about we take that 18M and fund a startup (or two) that could probably do recovery.gov plus a bunch of other public facing .govs

Not that I want the govt playing VC, just saying.

The first problem is that the government would be even more horrible at choosing among startups than they are at choosing among big corporations with several past bids under their belt. The second problem is that startups are generally a perfect storm of failure when it comes to navigating the intricate hurdles of securing government contracts.

Hopefully this isn't the new black hole that they're channeling the cut Defense department funds into...

$18m doesn't go far in the DoD, but your point about cut funds is false--the DoD budget has been increased.

http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=1...

Seems a bit ironic.

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