(2 of 2 --> I got "comment too long!)

Now, this won't be popular with a lot of us here, myself included, as doing stuff like this will displace some revenue streams companies and people depend on. However, a longer view looks considerably more attractive. The jobs created are needed. Tie this stuff into education, and it's a perfect "farm" training ground for up and coming developers to work on important projects and get good experiences.

A lean and mean digital civics is attractive and necessary for a lot of reasons. The case for doing it on open code and open data is super compelling and compliant with the basic ideas behind public works anyway.

As citizens, we get to experience our taxes actually getting more work done and at a lower cost. And yes, spending will move toward other areas where it's possible to extract revenue, and that's an ongoing problem. Real good can be done, and that's what I'm writing about.

Companies wanting to or needing to interoperate with the State government can do so employing everything from really old school, courier, papers, and the like, through to very new school, all digital, everything operating in ways we know can work well given the incentives are where they need to be and the organization is funded as it needs to be.

The second and third order effects could be very significant! Standards fall out of this kind of thing, and devices, protocols, and all manner of currently diverse and expensive to maintain systems could be made leaner, meaner, have much longer service lives and the knowledge needed will be out in the open and available to the people who need it.

Obviously security needs to be a consideration. And that's no different than what we have going on right now. The big difference is an open society can be built on open code and data and having it be funded in ways that maximize the value to the public while also keeping costs where they need to be, appropriate makes a ton of longer term sense.

In a scenario where this is all closed, the idea of competition is often cited as a reason to do it private, but the realities are corruption and other harsh realities tend toward scenarios where lock in type solutions favor the public getting the lowest value possible for the highest dollar amount possible. We see this over and over and over. And that's why the ASA (American Software Association) opposed the effort in Oregon and another one in Texas with such zeal it was kind of amazing really.

Should we do it in some fashion as I've hinted at here, the opposite becomes true. Initial value for the dollar might not be a whole lot different from whatever contract + proprietary software delivers. Over time, the trend will be toward getting very high value for the dollar.

Regarding Standards... Think center of gravity. Systems like these can have very attractive start costs. And cost of change will vary, and likely be made higher by current players wanting to leverage lock in to preserve revenue streams (and who can blame them?). Fair enough, but as more gets done, that center of gravity will prove compelling, and we all get the benefits working in a similar, more compatible way provide.

When we all require a resource or process, and let's just take power or water for a moment... Running these things at profit puts incentives in the wrong places. Maximizing profit is not the same as maximizing the public use value. And where that is wrong, everyone takes a small hit, and those tend to add right up.

Maximizing public use value can end rent seeking type arrangements that cause more grief than expected. Maintenance is one, tech debt is another of many that come to mind. Where these are out of public view, they tend to get ignored and risks accumulate, until there is an event, and suddenly, those risks play out, and we the public are faced with a large bill, and that's an old story, no need to say more.

I'll end with the belief this seems to be an excellent way to employ open code and data. And one of the big problems we find out there with open code and data is failure to work on "dull" or "uninteresting" problems. How many times do we have to find out that project X is being used by everyone, and nobody really owns making sure it's going to make sense to continue to use it?

Now I will just stop there. That's it. Some municipality somewhere would LOVE to get a State grant to get this started, and some State somewhere really needs this kind of thing enough to bite on the idea, and there are a ton of messes to clean up.

So maybe those should just start getting cleaned up!