Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time
wired.com
wired.com
http://www.eventbrite.com/e/saving-healthcaregov-tickets-118...
Let us know if you have questions! Or if you want to help.
UPDATE: we seem to be sold out. Trying to find a larger venue. In the meantime, feel free to sign up on the waiting list and you'll get an email as soon as we find a room with more capacity.
Check's already cashed, right?
I would have concluded the exact opposite. Making a full recording available allows any attempt to quote part the meeting out of context discoverable and provable. Without a recording, anyone that attends the meeting could jot down a quote that serves their purpose and report it without anyone being able to dispute the context (aside from relying on the memories of other attendees).
Especially when the narrative people want to spin is "Gee golly whiz look at those Silicon Valley folks saving the day!".
Anything else is CYOA, and it'd be nice if people could actually rise to the occasion and be honest and precise.
(Besides, if you are honest on everything, and somebody just hits you out of context, you can defend yourself by providing additional context. None of this is going to matter in 5 years anyways, so might as well set a good example.)
I don't think so. The people fixing the obamacare website most likely want obamacare to succeed, and are aware that there's a hungry media out there ready and waiting for the next story revealing just how awful the original website (and, they'll insinuate, hence obamacare itself) is.
I can write down an out-of-context statement and report it with or without a recording. If anything, a recording is positive because you can contest what I claim you said with a hard-to-fake, in-context version of things.
Yeah, keep telling yourself that. The hacker community as a whole "values openness" when it suits them. 90% of the time, it's tribal Homo sapiens pattern matching the markers of their own tribe while imitating the outward appearance of the 10% that truly matters.
Valuing truth over your own ego is a majority stance and a minority capability around here.
(As one of the other comments alluded to, we're engineers, not politicians, and we're certainly not equipped to deal with the media parsing our every sentence for soundbites.)
Technologically "hard" or Politically "hard"
?
[1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOp...
How do you, as technologically savvy people who are in a better position than most to understand the grave transgressions of the NSA, reconcile your support of an administration that has shown complete disregard for our privacy and civil liberties (specifically within the scope of the NSA/Snowden scandal) with your inherent duty, as an engineer of powerful systems, to above all further the public good? As a subtext, what are your thoughts on continuing to further said administration's political aims in one arena while they restrict your rights and livelihood* in another?
Furthermore, and more on topic, what steps have you taken to place privacy concerns at the forefront when creating a service that consumes vast amounts of personal and medical information from millions of people?
Last, as someone who has been "on the inside" do you see corruption as a large problem with government procurement? To what extent did corruption create the situation that you were called in to fix with the original HealthCare.gov fiasco?
*assuming, of course, that the NSA/Snowden revelations have hurt US tech interests
Edit: Mods, if you disapprove of this comment feel free to delete it. That said, I think these are some important questions that need to be asked.
The NSA revelations aren't just some small political transgressions, this is a rather world shaking development that shows we have been subject to vast, malicious (i.e. not for our good but for the good of others), and illegal surveillance that has steadily eroded many of our God given* rights and liberties. On top of that, this is something the administration has wholeheartedly supported and gotten in bed with, and shows no signs of turning back (beyond token political acts that will in the end accomplish very little, if anything).
So, wouldn't you question further actions by someone who has proven themselves to act against you so wholeheartedly? Myself, while I normally would have been overjoyed at a healthcare overhaul in this country, am now extremely suspicious of the motivations behind it. Why would this administration act in our favor when they have been acting against us for so long?
Thus, my question to brandonb :)
*as per the Declaration of Independence
Edit: I would say a good analogy would be: Assuming I were Charlie Brown, at what point do I begin to doubt Lucy's psychiatric advice when she's pulled the football out from under me so many times?
People often think that the failings of a system are chiefly because of the motivations of the actors in the system. But what's more accurate is that the failings are often because of the structure of the system, and the inhabitants often don't feel they have the ability to change the structure.
The least effective way to change the behavior of a system is to twiddle the various buttons and knobs that each inhabitant has ready access to. The most effective way to change the behavior of a system is to change the overall goal of the system, which would necessitate a complete restructuring.
So that's why it is easy to believe that various NSA wrongdoings aren't entirely because of nefarious motivations (although that is probably part of it), and very much driven by system structure (log and analyze data) that simply weren't "checked" as their technological tools and abilities increased over time. What many of us have failed to realize is that our own personal security has been a form of security-through-obscurity in the past. We can put personal data up on a website and not tell anyone, and before search spiders, it might have stayed private. But we can't expect such a website to stay private these days, because of how technology has increased. It's the same with our private data, and how our browsing habits can be mined to create freakishly accurate personal profiles. There was never any privacy protection there to begin with other than obscurity, and we just convinced ourselves it was there by believing in social mores that hadn't been challenged until technology increased too much.
Meanwhile, the health system was about constructing an entirely new structure/system for health insurance, benefits, and penalties.
So... I wouldn't say it is a matter of compartmentalizing. It's more a matter of appreciating that the government is a huge collection of disparate systems and motivations, and that there can be simultaneous breakdowns and successes.
While I mostly agree with you, it's important to realize that a single administration (speaking directly of the President, his close advisors, and officials he has put in place) has both encouraged the NSA in their actions and also produced the ACA. At what point do we write off the machinations of a political machine as the intricacies of a complicated system, or vice versa? Do we merely ignore common threads that point to a single motive as conspiratorial thinking, or do we act assuming the worst?
I'm not so naive as to think the NSA has become what it is through the directions of a single person or group. I mostly agree that you hit the nail on the head, but the fact remains that many people in our current administration were given a high level overview of current processes, projects, and operations and gave the O.K. to not only continue in the current direction, but intensified efforts, brushing aside the consequences and ramifications that only a stupid person would have ignored. And I refuse to believe that these people got to where they are via stupidity.
All European ISPs must give a certain organisation a command shell (sort-of) that allows them to copy any and all traffic to a specific customer without the ISP even knowing they're doing it. They have to do this for free and provide free tech support. This is why cisco, alcatell, juniper, HP, ... both produce "lawful intercept" versions of all their network software [1]. Installation of these images in most of the world (not just Europe) is not optional.
Unlike in the US, the ISPs never get to see any warrants. Asking for that is a crime, that can land you in prison. "Obstructing" justice can also land both directors and techies in jail (ie. not promptly providing prompt tech support to idiot police officers who wonder why tapping an ADSL line does not tell them when the tapped person checks gmail on their phone). There are not allowed to be limitations. For example if you are an American customer of an ISP that operates in Europe, they can tap you (e.g. Liberty Global). And obviously, the government refuses to pay anything for the quite substantial effort required to implement all this.
ISPs only deal with a certain central organisation (it's more-or-less interpol) that basically gives open tapping to a list of European organisations that doesn't fit on a single page, and several organisations that aren't even European.
So given this, what do you think the entire European telco, government, and ... industry should do ? Keep in mind that people working for this infrastructure is probably around 50 million people.
[1] http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst65...
It isn't, you're doing it already. Living and working here, paying taxes, it all supports the state to some extent.
You can't escape these dilemmas and still interact with the world in basically any way. Take any product. Money that buys avocados will inevitably support Mexican cartels. Widespread guac boycotts would just starve the farmers trying to claw towards legitimacy through economic growth.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230327770...
We're all hypocrites given enough scrutiny.
And there are some reasonable defenses for it.
Jeremy Lott wrote a whole book on that topic, "In Defense of Hypocrisy," http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595550526/kevinholts...
Other arguments offered in this review: http://www.bookslut.com/nonfiction/2006_11_010195.php
(This is, of course, assuming this is hypocritical, as not everyone finds the spying out of bounds, difficult as that may be to conceive. Entirely separate discussion there though, one that's been trod to death on these boards.)
When was it shown that this was not for our good but for the good of others? I think you may be confusing the ends and the means. If the means turned out to not be good for us, that does not mean the ends they were trying to achieve weren't for our good. It just means they failed.
(just saying, it matters to be correct on this topic)
> an administration that has shown complete disregard for our privacy and civil liberties
Is it really true that this is the case for this administration more so than other administrations? Admittedly the increase in opportunity for surveillance has been huge in the last couple decades so the quality of the comparison degrades as you go further back in time, but what the NSA has been doing seems entirely in line with what they've been doing for decades. To be clear, what they've been doing for decades is really, really shitty and I'm glad people are finally outraged, but then wouldn't your view require basically boycotting working with any administration ever? I don't think it's an unreasonable proposition to not hold hostage policies that are potentially worthy just for a single (however significant) issue that you disagree with.
> your support of an administration
> continuing to further said administration's political aims
This leads to me to my next point: it seems like your comment assumes that this was done purely out of a desire to help a political figure, instead of considering the possibility that the volunteers may think that Healthcare.gov is a worthy goal or at least that its brokenness is negatively affecting the American people (I don't think there's any disagreement across the political spectrum on this latter point). That's an awfully cynically political way to look at the world, and I don't think it's accurate to assume that that viewpoint is shared by the volunteers. I think it's probably a safe assumption that the volunteers acted more out of a desire to see hc.gov working than to see Obama's political capital enhanced per se.
Now if only you had asked something about technology.
False equivalence. The correct analogy would be "Do you quit your job when your company does something you don't like?"
Many people would answer yes to that.
If you want to change it, change it from the inside.
Thats is what they are doing.
People can protest on the streets or online but changing the government from the inside will be more effective.
The people who join the government to try to change it from the inside are the same people who, five years later, complain that their hands are tied and they can't effect meaningful change for the better and must continue along the well-trodden path of obedience. I think Obama is a great example here, but I'm sure there are many others.
If these YC alums, etc decide they don't want to be a "cog in the machine", how else can they have improved the healthcare web site?
Government is not like a company you can boycott; it is an unavoidable attribute of human society. The operative questions are how are you participating in it to achieve your aims, and how effectively.
Smart people often disagree about things in this world, including in particular whether the actions of the NSA show "complete disregard for our privacy and civil liberties" and whether they're justified or not.
Also, half the idea of democracy is to compromise with other people. Thinking that people shouldn't do any work for the government because they don't agree with some of the actions of that government is ridiculous.
Were the original developers developing against a (mostly) static spec, or were the terms constantly being changed up until October of last year?
Are there any plans to carry this forward and redesign some of the state exchanges?
Cannot speak directly to experience of original developers, but I could see moving target as being an issue.
Would love to see our code open sourced someday and be useful to others, especially state exchanges, but that is a long-term goal. Currently we are laser-focused on getting everything ready to ship by next open enrollment.
I mean, the original site was awarded to CGI Inc without any biding process... and they aren't even a US company. Why did we not have US professionals/companies build this thing the first go-round?
I could have imagined a High-Tech All-Stars sort of thing... each major US tech company sends 1 or 2 representatives to collaborate and work together to build this new long-lasting piece of national infrastructure.
I believe CGI actually got this contract via an IDIQ, which is an "indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity" contract, allowing HHS to add additional "tasks" to the IDIQ contract as long as its within certain bounds set by the contract, and if it stays within their GSA fee schedule. IDIQs started becoming popular in the 90s as a more expedient way to contract rather than the months-long or even years-long process of a standard competitive bidding process. However, it only really solved the procurement woes for incumbents. I couldn't find the original CGI-Federal contract, but here's at least their press release: http://www.cgi.com/en/CGI-selected-build-US-wide-competitive...
Also, here's Accenture RFP award as the prime for fixing up the site for the next enrollment cycle. https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&i...
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/11/26/Another-Fa...
That's $1.1 billion lost, another $4 billion planned. I can't even imagine what I'd demand of a $4 billion piece of software.
It's fascinating how much of the world is run by decades-old software, with no serious hope of an upgrade.
Think about it: Even contracted physical construction gets screwed up in large scale government projects, and building good contracts about software development is much harder that contracts about physical construction.
In-house development simply doesn't have the kind of indirection where the bloodsuckers can get in.
And you're not addressing the main issue: projects being way too big and unwieldy (if now somewhat less expensive) even before they go over budget, over time or flatly fails altogether.
If the CGIs of the world actually delivered a functional product on time and on schedule, the fact that they earn handsomely in the process is at best a secondary concern. Next to the cost of the staggering embarrassment that was the failure of the first Obamacare website, whatever CGI quoted is a rounding error.
On another note I am really delighted to see that the government was forced to step out of their bubble to make this happen.
As we put so many resources behind that attempt, this proves it's a difficult problem to solve that requires more resources.
It logically follows that more taxpayer money is required for the next iteration. How else could we solve such an important problem?
EDIT: Disclaimer: I did not work on Healthcare.gov, but did study up on the entire architecture while trying for a gig on the recovery team.
There's an "enrollment" period where you can switch/reenroll in your plan. It only lasts a few weeks to a few months in the end of the year. During that period, load is immense.
Outside that period, there's extremely low traffic, as only people who have "qualifying events" are eligible to shop for insurance - if you get married, divorced, lose a job, etc.
Letting someone else figure out what to do with 95% of your server capacity for 10ish months out of the year is a pretty decent cost savings for the government, I'd imagine.
So that's how they're doing it, they got a programmer from the future to help!
Now we have people that were productive at companies making services we pay for of our own volition spending time on this thing that doesn't work as a symptom, not a cause. So confused why this is a thing.