OpenGov, a startup intended to transform the way governments manage tax dollars | Hacker News Reader

OpenGov, a startup intended to transform the way governments manage tax dollars

a16z.com

72 pointszpj500522 comments

Definitely think this is a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, it looks like this solution does not address the balance sheet side of the equation, which is where most towns are in dire straights (even if they don't admit it as they have more latitude in not recognizing the future costs of say pensions than corporations do). Until people have true transparency into this area, it will be hard to make good decisions as an electorate.

Again, think its a great step forward...on a very long road

Pretty sad to see HN become a parody of itself on a near constant basis: half of the comments attacked the article as "link bait" without even addressing the actual content. I've been watching OpenGov closely for the last year and have been impressed (and jealous that I didn't start this myself having worked in big gov IT shops my whole career and half jokingly playing around with the idea of a SAAS offering for publishing budget data online; something that seemed a difficult enough problem that I though it was magic when I was able to see it firsthand with OpenGov's software)

It's one of the few places where the majority of the people either writing the posts or being written about are also the members doing the commenting. I think timezone may be a factor as well; I've made comments which were highly upvoted throughout the day, only to be decimated over the evening. So what your seeing as a parody of itself, I see as different gravity wells of opinion that present at different times. Who sees the story first often dictates the initial run. We'll see a woman in tech article loaded with borderline sexist comments against women, then a singular voice pops up and says how disappointed they are in the community. That gets voted to the top. It's routine, and it's essentially what happened to this article.

As somebody who is interested in improving my awareness of local politics, I think this is really great. Not only have these guys created a beautiful interface for viewing budget allocations, they have actually convinced governments to use it. I look forward to the day this comes to San Francisco. Even those with no interest in politics will be better off for it, as greater transparency will surely improve the way our money is being spent.

As usual, most HN comments are negative. I've met Balaji, and he can talk some good hype when he wants to, but I think it's hardly disingenuous or linkbaity to emphasize that OpenGov already has customers with $50 billion in revenues/spending. It could potentially be used by any city, state, or national government, or really any large organization spending public dollars. That's an enormous potential market.

If you want to learn more about the Civic Tech/Gov Tech space, checkout the Code for America Summit live stream when it continues tomorrow at http://www.codeforamerica.org/summit/

(Shameless plug: I will be presenting about our start-up tomorrow)

It's not just A16Z who's getting into this space. Check out the new fund by Ron Bouganim.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/09/15...

And obviously, Y-Combinator is now getting into the government space. https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

It's been a slow build, but the industry is huge.

See Balance Sheet here: www.sausalitoca.opengov.com

https://sausalitoca.opengov.com/transparency#/624/breakdown=...

The title is nonsensical. The company's clients have 50 billion in revenue so that makes opengov a 50 billion dollar company? By that logic the food caterer to Apple is a 100 (?) billion dollar company.

Prior to reading the article I thought the main purpose of opengov was to help local governments facilitate open access to their data. When I have come across a government that uses opengov it is in reality more of a gate keeper. Adding another level of control to government data rather than letting citizens have direct access to the raw data.

The change in focus to internal use by governments could indicate a lack of money being spent for the original purpose.

I had the same issue. 50 billion is used interchangeably in the most nonsensical ways. (Hey! its a 50 Billion dollar industry! we capture 5% of that and we have $2.5 Billion in Revenues!)

1. $50B startup (ie market cap)

2. $50 billion customer list (whatever that means)

3. Customers with $50B in Revenue

4. Customers with $50B in spending budgets.

You might as well just call it a "17 trillion dollar company" to claim credit for the entire US GDP.

You're hired! -Ben Horowitz

This is pretty much clickbait.

For those who want the gist of what this article/startup really is, it's a centralized platform for managing budgets in a transparent way used by governments internally (to create reports, manage expenses, etc). It makes it more efficient for different departments to collectively manage and access budgets. Apparently it gets $50B of government spending flowing through it's systems. This internal usage is then presented to citizens in a Mint.com like format in the name of transparency (like here: https://losangeles.opengov.com/)

Pretty cool and I wish them well, but it is nowhere near what the title implies.

If you or anyone can suggest a more accurate, neutral title, we'll update it. Often an article contains such a description somewhere.

Perhaps "$50B of Government spending is managed by a platform created by OpenGov" is more accurate and to the point.

http://www.Tradeshift.com is already well into that game IMHO and doing well.

I am amused that to cut through the noise the author - a former Developmental Biology graduate student, who went on to found a successful bio-tech startup, who presently lectures at Stanford and is a partner in one of the premier VC's in the valley - is foced to use linkbait to drive eyeballs to his article just like the rest of us hustlers.

(1) https://www.linkedin.com/in/balajissrinivasan

The "lecturing at Stanford" is also oversold. He taught one instance of a MOOC that was really one of the most poorly prepared I've ever experienced, and eventually devolved into him reading nearly verbatim from a written PDF.

EDIT: I toned down the criticism slightly and made it more specific (changed "worst" to "most poorly prepared").

He taught statistics at Stanford for a few years. He also taught startup engineering (CS184) before doing the MOOC.

Since the thread has been nearly entirely about the baity title, we changed the latter to a more neutral sentence from the article.

While I understand your intentions I believe your action to be incorrect. The original title of the post was the exact title of the source article. Also the OP is associated with opengov so they were presumably satisfied with the title.

As you stated the thread has been mainly about the title. That was what posters found the most interesting part of a fluff piece.

Thanks for caring enough to make this comment.

I'm actually fine with the title change as the original title seems to be confusing to some.

It's not a question of intent but of the site rules. The rule is to use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait [1]. In this case it was arguably both, so the original title was ruled out.

One reason why baity titles are precluded is that they cause precisely the sort of bikeshed title war that brought this thread down.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com