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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."
Then: "So let's have an app contest to design neat applications for smartphones!"
Now: "Well it didn't work out because the apps were designed for smartphones..."
NO SHIT
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
Looks like the media was finally forced to deal with that crone's deep-seated racism. Oh well. Soon she'll be back at her old job passing out poisoned apples to children in the enchanted forest.
Wait. So they thought that writing an app would be useful? C'mon. Apps aren't useful, they're cute.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
But a better idea would be to have the government involved with the citizen, every now and then.
A nebulous set of requirements leads to software that doesn't fulfill unwritten desires of the client. An old story.
Contests are just a way of getting lots of people to work on a problem and then only paying the best.
Why isn't "cool" enough?
You are welcome on my lawn.
98% of "apps" in "app stores" are bullshit, that have the functionality of a web form, but that for some reasons were coded in a proprietary, non portable API instead of the ubiquitous xml-http-javascript-html-LAMP. The only reason I can think of is that "buying the app" is a kind of subscription service, for which subscription systems would work better. It doesn't explain the free apps.
I mean WTF, a "New York Times" app? What can it do that a web browser cannot do ?
The only 2% of apps that make sense actually use the terminal in a way for which web techs are not optimal: for its I/O capabilities (GPS, camera, phone...)
I am a teacher, and so I know this first hand: poorly designed rules result in poorly designed products. If smartphone apps are no good, then prohibit them. This has nothing to do with the designers or the idea of using a contest to design good software. This is about redesigning the rules to get what you actually want.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
Here is the pulse. And here is your finger, far from the pulse, jammed straight up your ass.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We're too cheap to pay software developers to build tools to actually enhance the performance of our duties.
When someone gives them to us free, we're too lazy to sift through them for ones that are useful.
When crowdsourcing or someone else identifies the useful ones for us, we're too cheap and lazy to maintain them.
So, the faceless bureaucrats would like to know....could you please get someone to identify what they need, code it up, and then integrate and maintain it indefinately. For free.
So they could do less "work".
All the Pr0N surfing and intern boinking is exhausting.
A quote, potentially flamebait, but not really. The truth is that people are buying smartphones en masse and developing an app is a good way to reach the public. Sorry my use of a quote confused you. Better luck next time you have mod points.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A contest might save money initially, but does it take into consideration the support, maintenance, updates, etc that the winning developer is going to offer?
In many software business models, the support is much more expensive than the actual application
the s\ame operation OpenBSD wanker Theo
New D.C. CTO scraps 'Apps for Democracy'