It's ridiculous each state is building it's own solution. The federal government should have created a FOSS flexible platform that each state could customize and contribute back to.
1. "The government is inefficient and doesn't have much experience with big IT projects." We should outsource things to the private sector, like we do the design of bridges and fighter jets.
2. Consultants want to maximise their profit by maximising billable hours. Obviously they don't recommend sharing things between states. Far more profitable to design a shitty 'enterprise grade' mess that will take ages to build, that nobody will compete to maintain, and that will need lots of (billable) maintenance.
3. The project fails, wasting loads of money.
4. People see all this wasted money. They conclude the government is inefficient.
5. People who know how to deliver working software see shitty designs, shitty incentives, and expensive cancellations. They conclude working on government IT projects would be bad for their sanity and their resume.
6. "The government is inefficient and doesn't have much experience with big IT projects."
the very "best" (scalable/widely applicable) solutions are supposed to bubble up. that's the idea behind american federalism!
Plenty of open source talent in Oregon. I imagine there'd be many volunteers for a big DB/web project. It should be possible to do, after all, would Cover Oregon be more complex than Firefox or the Linux kernel?
In theory, not be all that difficult to hire a good project management team, set up the framework and let contributors work on it. Probably get done much quicker and of course, at way less cost.
Of course, doing that is taking a risk which is routinely avoided by timid bureaucrats and enterprises. Though the lesson of Oregon's experience is there to be learned--it shows the far bigger risks of doing things the same old way.
Hire bigco, publish what they give you so the neighbours can also use it and you're not stuck with bigco for support. ie you can also fire bigco if they suck once you hired them.
Maybe my interpretation of your idea wouldn't work exactly as you has in mind, but I see your point, that maintaining greater control of the development process would likely lead to a more coherent and predictable product that functions in accordance with carefully designed specs.
Among flies in the ointment is the necessity for such a highly principled and skilled steering group to manage the effort with the requisite wisdom around scheduling releases and titrating the level of community involvement. The level of talent it implies is likely in short supply.
That said, an admiral proposal, distinctly possible, even revolutionary. To quote Spinoza, "all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare".