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Gov't App Contests Are Cool, But Are They Useful?
theodp writes "In 2008, Washington, DC, launched one of the hotter trends in public-sector technology: the 'apps contest'. But even as more jurisdictions jump on the bandwagon, the contests are reportedly producing uneven results, and the city that started it all is jumping off the bandwagon. 'I don't think we're going to be running any more Apps for Democracy competitions quite in that way,' says Bryan Sivak, who became the District's CTO in 2009. Sivak calls Apps for Democracy a 'great idea' for getting citizen software developers involved with government, but he also hints that the applications spun up by these contests tend to be more 'cool' than useful to the average city resident. 'If you look at the applications developed in both of the contests we ran, and actually in many of the contests being run in other states and localities,' Sivak says, 'you get a lot of applications that are designed for smartphones, that are designed for devices that aren't necessarily used by the large populations that might need to interact with these services on a regular basis.' Sivak also cited maintenance of the new apps over the long term as a concern."
Jonathan Swift
swift@softwareproblem.org
April 14, 2010
While I was correct when I knew that you would all piss yourselves laughing when I finally told you what The Secret was, I was not only quite mistaken as to The Secret's true nature, but denying the very existence of The Secret in the most batshit psychotic way.
I won't tell you quite yet what The Secret I was really referring to was, but when I finally do you will agree that I made the right decision to post it at PRQ AB.
But when you read the rest of this essay, not only will you have found that not only have I asked Rusty to close my K5 account in a way that puts Mindpixel's route out the building completely to shame, you will struggle desperately to get all those Scandinavian folks to award me the Nobel Prize in Suicide before I no longer have the ability to appreciate the fact that I had finally won the Nobel Prize I always wanted.
You will regard my delusion that I am The Second Coming of Christ as no delusion when I go on to explain how I will explain in a transparently simply and obvious way why all blonde people will point out to you that they will award me both the Peace and Medicine prizes instead.
The language I refer to as The Language of the Gods might be more lucidly described as Speaking in Code.
Psychotics speak in code in a way that makes no sense to anyone. Every Psychotic's encoded speech leads every Sane person to regard every Psychotic as delusional.
The Sane speak in code in a way that makes no sense to Psychotic people. The encoded speech of the sane leads every Psychotic to regard every Sane person as delusional.
It is for this reason that Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski devoted two decades or so to eluding capture by law enforcement while sending letter bombs with which he murdered several University professors and grievously crippled several others. Each such bomb was accompanied by a detailed explanation of just why he sent each such bomb to that specific University professor. The most famous such detailed explanation is now known as The Unabomber Manifesto.
All Ted hoped to achieve was to point out the errors of their ways to the Academic Community: he regarded Modern Technology as a threat to the natural environment. By murdering University professors, he hoped to bring about the salvation of the natural environment by restoring Sanity to those who Theodore Kaczynski knew were the most floridly delusional kinds of people.
Neurotics speak in code in a way that no one notices.
Psychotherapists understand both kinds of code.
Psychotherapists can speak code to psychotics in a way that they make complete sense to each other.
Psychotherapists can hear what neurotics are really talking about, then say what the neurotics have been in incredible pain since the earliest days of their childhood because their parents are so viciously and sadistically cruel that they refuse to say it to them.
Child psychologist Alice Miller's short, simple, lucidly written book Drama of the Gifted Child explains that psychotherapists learn to speak in code because their parent's great suffering enables them to start teaching their children that code from the earliest days of their infancy.
Just mentioning Drama of the Gifted Child to my psychotherapist Dr. I. led her to become overwhelmed with grief.
This also leads to the bizarre phenomenon that psychotherapists often take their liv