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Citizenville: Newsom Argues Against Bureaucracy, Swipes At IT Departments
Nerval's Lobster writes "Gavin Newsom, former mayor of San Francisco and current lieutenant governor of California, argues in his new book Citizenville that citizens need to take the lead in solving society's problems, sidestepping government bureaucracy with a variety of technological tools. It's more efficient for those engineers and concerned citizens to take open government data and use it to build apps that serve a civic function—such as Google Earth, or a map that displays crime statistics—than for government to try and provide these tools itself. But Newsom doesn't limit his attacks on government bureaucracy to politicians; he also reserves some fire for the IT departments, which he views as an outdated relic. 'The traditional IT department, which set up and maintained complex, centralized services—networks, servers, computers, e-mail, printers—may be on its way out,' he writes. 'As we move toward the cloud and technology gets easier to use, we'll have less need for full-time teams of people to maintain our stuff.' Despite his advocacy of the cloud and collaboration, he's also ambivalent about Wikileaks. 'It has made government and diplomacy much more challenging and ultimately less honest,' he writes at one point, 'as people fear that their private communications might become public.' Nonetheless, he thinks WikiLeaks and its ilk are ultimately here to stay: 'It is happening, and it's going to keep happening, and it's going to intensify.' In the end, he feels the benefits of collaboration and openness outweigh the drawbacks." Keep reading for the rest of Nick's review.
Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government
author
Gavin Newsom, Lisa Dickey
pages
272
publisher
Penguin Press HC
rating
7/10
reviewer
Nick Kolakowski
ISBN
1594204721
summary
A rallying cry for revolutionizing democracy in the digital age
Gavin Newsom has enjoyed quite a career in government: after serving two terms as mayor of San Francisco, he became lieutenant governor of California. Maintaining the status quo of our current political system, one could argue, is in his best interest. Yet in his new book Citizenville (co-written with Lisa Dickey, who’s collaborated with a number of famous people on their books), Newsom argues that government should take a backseat to citizens solving society’s problems via collaboration and technology.
“We have to disenthrall ourselves, as Abraham Lincoln used to say, of the notion that politicians and government institutions will solve our problems,” he writes at one point. “The reality is, we have to be prepared to solve our own problems.” The government structure that facilitates such troubleshooting, he adds, “makes use of social media, networks, peer-to-peer engagement, and other technological tools.” In other words, government should open up its vast datasets so that armies of developers and engineers can transform that data into software we can all use.
According the book’s thesis, it’s more efficient for those engineers and concerned citizens to take open government data and use it to build apps that serve a civic function—such as Google Earth, or a map that displays crime statistics—than for government to try and provide these tools itself. It’s easier for citizens to engage with their representatives via Twitter and online chat rooms than gather in a physical room, where voices can be shouted down. He acknowledges that collaboration and technology has its limits: there will always be a need for elected leaders to help manage things, and nobody wants every bit of private data open to widespread scrutiny (to his credit, Newsom acknowledges his own issues with making his official schedule and meetings public).
It’s even possible, he suggests, to make civic involvement look more like “Farmville” or an online game—the “Citizenville” of the title. While he positions this idea as more of a metaphor than something that should be pushed into a reality, he repeatedly suggests that a “mashup of gaming and civic engagement,” powered by “real physical rewards,” could get people to interact more fully with their communities.
But there’s also a significant threat to this vision of supreme interconnectedness: government bureaucracy, which moves slowly and hates releasing anything—such as statistical data—that might cause politicians embarrassment.
“Our government is clogged with a dense layer of bureaucracy, a holdover from an earlier era that adds bloat and expense,” Newsom writes. “But technology can get rid of that clay layer by making it possible for people to bypass the usual bureaucratic morass.” Social networks have made interaction with government a two-way street, forcing politicians to listen to constituent concerns well before the next Election Day.
Newsom doesn’t limit his attacks on government bureaucracy to politicians; he also reserves some fire for the IT departments, which he views as an outdated relic. “The traditional IT department, which set up and maintained complex, centralized services—networks, servers, computers, e-mail, printers—may be on its way out,” he writes. “When the computer revolution began, IT departments were truly needed, as people had no idea how to set up and use the new technologies infiltrating their work space.”
Things these days are different, he argues: “As we move toward the cloud and technology gets easier to use, we’ll have less need for full-time teams of people to maintain our stuff.”
Newsom was mayor, of course, when city network engineer Terry Childs locked down San Francisco’s FiberWAN fiber-optic network and refused to give up the password. Freezing the network also stopped government emails and payroll. After days of outside contractors trying—and failing—to break into the system, Newsom finally had to march into Childs’ jail cell and practically beg him to surrender the 28-digit code. Whether that experience slanted Newsom against IT departments in general is hard to tell, but it’s clear from the book that he’s embraced cloud services as the way of the future.
That being said, Newsom does believe that online collaboration and sharing have their limits as forces for good. He’s not the biggest fan of WikiLeaks. “It has made government and diplomacy much more challenging and ultimately less honest,” he writes at one point, “as people fear that their private communications might become public.” Nonetheless, he thinks WikiLeaks and its ilk are ultimately here to stay: “It is happening, and it’s going to keep happening, and it’s going to intensify.” Privacy isn’t dead, but it’s definitely on life support.
Newsom also isn’t a starry-eyed ingénue: he knows that bureaucracy is firmly baked into how we do things, and he knows that all these shiny technological tools won’t necessarily make government more efficient overnight. However, he’s also relentlessly optimistic in technology’s ability to bring about change—even if that change proves detrimental to our current system.
You can purchase Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
“We have to disenthrall ourselves, as Abraham Lincoln used to say, of the notion that politicians and government institutions will solve our problems,” he writes at one point. “The reality is, we have to be prepared to solve our own problems.” The government structure that facilitates such troubleshooting, he adds, “makes use of social media, networks, peer-to-peer engagement, and other technological tools.” In other words, government should open up its vast datasets so that armies of developers and engineers can transform that data into software we can all use.
According the book’s thesis, it’s more efficient for those engineers and concerned citizens to take open government data and use it to build apps that serve a civic function—such as Google Earth, or a map that displays crime statistics—than for government to try and provide these tools itself. It’s easier for citizens to engage with their representatives via Twitter and online chat rooms than gather in a physical room, where voices can be shouted down. He acknowledges that collaboration and technology has its limits: there will always be a need for elected leaders to help manage things, and nobody wants every bit of private data open to widespread scrutiny (to his credit, Newsom acknowledges his own issues with making his official schedule and meetings public).
It’s even possible, he suggests, to make civic involvement look more like “Farmville” or an online game—the “Citizenville” of the title. While he positions this idea as more of a metaphor than something that should be pushed into a reality, he repeatedly suggests that a “mashup of gaming and civic engagement,” powered by “real physical rewards,” could get people to interact more fully with their communities.
But there’s also a significant threat to this vision of supreme interconnectedness: government bureaucracy, which moves slowly and hates releasing anything—such as statistical data—that might cause politicians embarrassment.
“Our government is clogged with a dense layer of bureaucracy, a holdover from an earlier era that adds bloat and expense,” Newsom writes. “But technology can get rid of that clay layer by making it possible for people to bypass the usual bureaucratic morass.” Social networks have made interaction with government a two-way street, forcing politicians to listen to constituent concerns well before the next Election Day.
Newsom doesn’t limit his attacks on government bureaucracy to politicians; he also reserves some fire for the IT departments, which he views as an outdated relic. “The traditional IT department, which set up and maintained complex, centralized services—networks, servers, computers, e-mail, printers—may be on its way out,” he writes. “When the computer revolution began, IT departments were truly needed, as people had no idea how to set up and use the new technologies infiltrating their work space.”
Things these days are different, he argues: “As we move toward the cloud and technology gets easier to use, we’ll have less need for full-time teams of people to maintain our stuff.”
Newsom was mayor, of course, when city network engineer Terry Childs locked down San Francisco’s FiberWAN fiber-optic network and refused to give up the password. Freezing the network also stopped government emails and payroll. After days of outside contractors trying—and failing—to break into the system, Newsom finally had to march into Childs’ jail cell and practically beg him to surrender the 28-digit code. Whether that experience slanted Newsom against IT departments in general is hard to tell, but it’s clear from the book that he’s embraced cloud services as the way of the future.
That being said, Newsom does believe that online collaboration and sharing have their limits as forces for good. He’s not the biggest fan of WikiLeaks. “It has made government and diplomacy much more challenging and ultimately less honest,” he writes at one point, “as people fear that their private communications might become public.” Nonetheless, he thinks WikiLeaks and its ilk are ultimately here to stay: “It is happening, and it’s going to keep happening, and it’s going to intensify.” Privacy isn’t dead, but it’s definitely on life support.
Newsom also isn’t a starry-eyed ingénue: he knows that bureaucracy is firmly baked into how we do things, and he knows that all these shiny technological tools won’t necessarily make government more efficient overnight. However, he’s also relentlessly optimistic in technology’s ability to bring about change—even if that change proves detrimental to our current system.
You can purchase Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Leave it to a politician to explain how the IT field is going to disappear. "As we move toward the cloud and technology gets easier to use", and who supports these technologies Mr. Mayor?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
So the more we rely on cloud services, the less we need full time people to maintain them? BWHAHAHAHAHA!
more anti-bureaucracy sludge. That poor horse must be FLAT by now.
There are too many of them and they need to be sacked en mass. Leave one or two of those who can actually come up with ideas to progress society forwards. This goes doubly for political and financial commentators who have a history of being as god as a toss of a coin. Sack 'em all.
So we are supposed to take technology advice from the same guy who allowed Terry Child's to have so much control that he was able to shutdown government operations? Yeah, let's go ahead put that data in the cloud. That will solve the problem.
I know it's tough to remain objective in situations like this. I've been in some form of IT support or another for the better part of 20 years now, so this emotionally feels like an attack on me and my way of life. I'm trying to remain objective and consider his proposal, but damned if it doesn't sound silly. Servers don't run themselves, even when (especially when) they're in the cloud, and SOMEONE has to be around to help users when their laptop stops working. It's simply not realistic to expect secretaries, accountants, etc. to maintain deep technical understanding of their computers in addition to the deep understanding necessary for their respective fields. Don't get me started on expecting grandmothers to self-support!
I'm sure IT support will change as a result of cloudification, but I also suspect that there won't be much of a net cost or headcount change, just a shift in how support is provided and where the resources reside. Companies using the cloud will have fewer server admins, but will most likely need more systems architects to manage the proliferation of interfaces and to ensure that whatever is built provides sufficient performance, cost, and stability for their customer base. Where these highly-experienced individuals with deep knowledge of the business will come from without the entry-level server admin jobs I have no idea, but I guess that's why I'm not a manager with a corner office.
Knows nothing to very little of IT. Most users think data moves about rainbow colored moonbeams farted out by hyper intelligent unicorns.
“When the computer revolution began, IT departments were truly needed, as people had no idea how to set up and use the new technologies infiltrating their work space.” Change that to:
“When the computer revolution was mature, IT departments were still truly needed, as people had no idea how to set up and use the new technologies infiltrating their work space.”
The very nature of a bureaucracy is to expand itself by limiting your actions and forcing certain non-productive activities upon you.
Given the benefits of having all that data, I wonder if companies would be quick to hand over their ability to control and monetize their business data so quickly to cloud providers.
However, there is certainly an argument for most services eventually being hosted in some way, by providers, but in the end, if feels a lot like the managed host providers who won't let you even see your equipment when it is installed, don't let you make changes, and charge you through the nose for adjustments.
In the end, I think that the best solution may be to take the commodity parts of the infrastructure and move them to the cloud providers, but maintain a small stable of experts in the IT needs of your particular field on staff to interface with the providers. That calls for the minimizing of IT staffing in-house, but not it's complete reduction to project management.
If he really thinks "citizens need to take the lead in solving society's problems, sidestepping government bureaucracy," he has a funny way of showing it, since he and Jerry Brown have presided over an unprecedented increase in the size and scope of California's state government, despite the state being essentially bankrupt if you add in all the unfunded liabilities for outrageous public sector union pensions.
If you're looking for more efficient government, you might want to look to Texas rather than California.
Sure, the IT departments of the 1990s aren't going to be the IT departments that we need today, but we rely on computers much more in 2013 than we did in 1995. In many places, if the computers are down (or the network is down) work simply cannot be done. A great example of this is at a bank, if the bank's internal network goes down, tellers cannot really process your transaction, they can't let you know if a check will clear, they can't add the deposited funds to your account. The best they can do is write you up a paper receipt and add the funds to your account whenever it system comes back up. An IT department is CRITICAL there to fix the problem ASAP, because otherwise the bank might as well stick a closed sign up. There are many other businesses that when the network goes down the business simply cannot function.
Yeah, everyone knows now how to stick an ethernet cord in your computer. Sure, most companies will have several people who know how to install RAM. How many of them though know how to fix a server when it goes down? How many of them know how to restore from backup? In 2013 it is true that an average (good) IT guy will spend less time having to do things in an average day than back in 1995 simply because hardware and software is much more reliable than it was back then and so less time is spent on maintenance and fixing minor issues. But when you have a failure of some component, having a well-trained and well-equipped IT staff is absolutely critical.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Oh, good. IT departments are going away. Is this when users finally stop calling me because they hid their whatsit toolbar in Outlook and they don't know what they did and they need it back and they don't know how to get it back and why is it so technical??!?!!!?!
Good. Maybe I'll get some real work done instead of bouncing between Slashdot and walking users through basic functions of Microsoft Office for the billionth time. Glad that users don't need my help anymore.
Gavin Newsom is a big, swinging dick in San Francisco city government and he gets what he wants from his IT department, rÃpidamente.
Once all his shit is outsourced to some "cloud provider", he's nothing more than yet another adulterer in San Francisco, just another entry in a vast database and he will NOT have his service expectations met.
And then he'll have another IT department.
So you propose a model of work that is not unlike prostitution.
Service providers only exist to help companies screw over workers.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Aaron Swartz certainly "sidestepped government bureaucracy with a variety of technological tools". Look what it got him.
I can picture it now. Just like the old place that moved over to gmail without any planning...
Q: "I deleted $BIG_IMPORTANT_PROPOSAL last month -- hey $IT_DUDE, can you recover it from backups?"
A: "Nope. You can check your trash folder if you haven't cleared it though"
Q: "Hey, we had an application for a patent denied, but I'm pretty sure we actually had something in place two years before, although it was very preliminary. Legal says we can resubmit with a modification.. Can you search the company emails for any of the following phrases.... and then recover the desktops of..."
A: "You can instruct every single user to log into their own account and... "
IT -- it's not that simple. Functionality -- it's not that cheap.
Look, I love Google. I think they deliver a fucking spectacular service for the $0.0 I pay them.
And cloud services, for what they pay, are often a value add.
But there's a reason they're cheap. And if you think you're going to get their support team to work overtime for less than it'd cost a full-time sysadmin or two -- you might be right. If your frequency of overtime and special cases are less than twice a year.
If you're even small (town) government sized though -- you better not try this.
But you have fun relying on the cloud and pushing your 'needs' out to third parties to whom you're about 0.0001% of their market share. Heck, at places I worked we'd usually ignore any request from anyone that was less than 10% -- although if they were actually insightful and useful we might ask a larger customer if they were interested as part of a development proposal.
And don't even get me started on what happens if this process gets adversarial. You thought that those data and logs were *your* data and logs? That you had rights to access the content in a timely manner? Was it in your contract? Did the temporary files that were flushed from the system when you migrated from east to west cloud get copied in accordance with your data retention policy? No? Well, that's mighty suspicious looking...
Before anyone goes and aggros the concept of government, try to remember first that government (as intended, anyways, prior to the inevitability that concentrated power attracts the corrupt) is supposed to be the gigantic lever by which the public can accomplish massive tasks that were too big for communities or individuals to do by themselves. Folk get together, agree on a solution, and contribute to it... and no matter what form that takes, you've just defined a government. That said, the nature (and speed) of technological advancement is changing this game. It doesn't make government bad; it just further empowers smaller units of self-government more than was previously possible... so yes, the equation can and should change... but does not serve as excuse for condemning something we've (in all of recorded human history) not been able to do long without.
Here's a good example of a light-weight (one man show) making information more readily available to citizens: http://openparliament.ca/
Politicians are part of the problem, thinking that we can legislate all sorts of things and put up road blocks to change. By making it difficult to get through the endless series of red tape, agencies and other petty dictators that just get in the way, government is the problem. This is what my (R) and (D) friends fail realize, as they keep voting for more government, then complaining about the results.
Typical Scenerio: X is a problem, we must do something, this is something therefore it must be done. It doesn't matter what the X is, nobody stops to think long enough to ask the question, why must we do anything to solve X. Perhaps X is just something we should live with, because the solution might just be worse than the problem.
Take the High Speed Rail system in California, nobody asked "what problem is this solving" because there are plenty of alternatives available (air, slow train, car). SO what does High Speed Rail system solve? I need to go from SF to LA, I can fly, or drive. HSR doesn't solve the problems of flight (still need to rent a car) nor solves the problem of speed, as it would probably take 1/2 the time of driving, and twice as long as flying. Does the Huge expense, we can hardly afford, really solving a problem? Or is it more of a "make work" project for the Unions. Or worse, a "feel good" project designed to illicit emotional response, to garner power among the elite ruling class. Yet, Gavin was a huge proponent of the HSR.
No, the best thing Government can do is simply get out of the way of normal business, and go after the bad guys who do wrong. One cannot stop bad things from happening, al we can do is punish those who are criminals.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It seems disingenuous for a politician to complain that corporate IT is too complex and too slow to adopt new technology when it's the politicians that put into place the policies that make IT so complex and slow to adopt to new techology. Sexual harassment laws and fear of lawsuits make us install firewalls and content filters, fear of violating privacy laws make us install IDS systems, restrict mobile devices, limit access to data, etc. Entire careers have been built around ensuring SarbOx compliance for IT systems.
These wouldn't all go away if there were no such laws, but the laws are part of what's put them into place.
Few outside of IT understand why Cloud Computing is not going to make any of these issues go away. It's nice that health records are stored at a HIPAA compliant SaaS privider, until we find out that Marketing has been downloading extracts that include PHI and using that data for a public marketing campaign. Or we find out that the CFO who insisted that he be allowed to access our financial data on his iPad lost the iPad on a train and he had turned off the PIN code because it was slowing him down so whoever picked up his laptop had unfettered access to the financial system over the weekend.
There's a reason why corporate IT is cumbersome and it's not because IT likes explaining for the hundredth time why you have to have a PIN code on your mobile device and why you can't use your 6 character dog's name followed by a digit as your password even if you did so at your previous company and never had a problem with it (as far as you know).
we'll have less need for full-time teams of people to maintain our stuff
When Microsoft started marketing Active Directory, this was basically their marketing slogan, i.e. (paraphrased) "use Active Directory, and you won't need a full-time IT staff."
And to think all those enterprise installations of Active Directory... all being run by part-timers.
Does he not understand that "the cloud" is centralized servers? Who maintains them?
I love hearing non-tech people expound on tech. It's like hearing accountants tell ranchers what their future will be like. Sure, they know somethings, and they might even know one thing really, really well. Heck, they might even be experts in accounting, but put 'em in with the cattle and watch them run for the fences.
This clown wouldn't last a single day in any IT post, and I am not about to listen to him or to his opinions.
"Computer... exit."
I haven't read his argument, just the summary provided here, but it's not clear to me that he's that far off. Fundamentally, our economy, our education systems, our corporate structure, and most assuredly our laws and regulations are stuck in the industrial era. By that, I mean that those structures are reactions to the problems encountered in industrializing: jobs had become less secure, cities had become crowded and crime-ridden, even basic jobs required literate employees and the like. Right now we are in the midst of a dramatic change in social structure, as profound and deep as that which accompanied the industrial revolution.
Before the industrial revolution, livings were primarily made in agriculture, with a thin layer of tradesmen, shopkeepers, and professionals in the urban centers, which were quite small. After the industrial revolution, livings were primarily made in large urban centers, and in manufacturing, the bureacracies required by and mass-market retailing enabled by industrialization, with a thin layer of farmers in the country. It appears to me that we are heading for a point where livings are primarily made by independent workers creating goods and services in small organizations, and providing them either online and globally, or offline and hyperlocally. The bureaucracies and clerks required by industrialization will largely be replaced, I think, by a combination of customer-management tools online, and the ability of small companies locally to deal directly with their customers without high overhead in either information or regulation. This will mean that living patterns will shift again, because people can do most of this kind of work living anywhere. It will also mean that the legal and regulatory structures will change to meet the challenges of that way of living, as the support systems of the city and the bureaucracy break down in the face of changes in where people are and how they work and what they do.
So in the face of all of that, the structures that IT was built up to support and enable — big business and big government primarily — will become more and more rare, and more and more distributed and cooperative rather than centralized and hierarchical. In such a world, where do big IT departments fit? I suspect that hosting will become largely cloud-based, and regulations will arise to ensure privacy and security in such systems. I suspect that the front-end to cloud-based services will be largely through devices owned and controlled by those accessing the data, but through applications owned and controlled by those who provide the data. Sure, there will be a need for a lot of savvy IT workers in such an environment, but the traditional IT departments are not only unhelpful in such a condition, they are actively harmful. And so they will be reduced, and mostly survive in large organizations that cannot or will not downsize to become more nimble.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
"The mainframe era ended"? Really? Then why is IBM having trouble keeping up with demand for them... and I hear that every ten years or so, when I hear the era is over.
The cloud? Tell me, what's the difference between the cloud and a time-shared mainframe? The only answer is that you've got a cluster of seriously high-powered servers instead of one high-powered box.
Move all your govenrment stuff to the cloud? Well, recently the UK decided it would *not* be doing that, because whichever cloud they were talking to could not guarantee that the private stuff (what we call PII, HIPAA, and all the rest) would reside solely on UK territory.
Some of us have varying levels of clearance, just so we can work with servers that might have that kind of data (I, personally, have a POTS, which entitles me to bottom secrets, or maybe just bargain basement secrets... it's a JOKE, son, a JOKE). Do you think that the folks who work the cloud *all* have that kind of training or commitment?
Phat chance.
We already hear, regularly, about somone working for a government entitiy who's looking up stuff on someone they shouldn't. You really think to trust folks who are stuck with, say, third shift and a lower salary than you're making? All of them?
Sorry, but nowhere *near* everything can be done on a pc.
mark
Despite his advocacy of the cloud and collaboration, he's also ambivalent about Wikileaks. 'It has made government and diplomacy much more challenging and ultimately less honest,' he writes at one point, 'as people fear that their private communications might become public.'
Not much more challenging. They just need a way to encrypt communications between two people. Like, say, PGP.
Come to think of it, why doesn't everybody have a PGP-enabled email system these days? Why aren't there common email clients - particularly web-based ones - that use PGP?
Note that this may not block individual attacks, but it should prevent mass cable intercepts.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
You have to be very naive to trust your data to "the cloud."
So I doubt that anyone significant is moving to it. For the clueless hordes on Faceplant, already accustomed to handing over everything about themselves, maybe so... but the people who actually run things, and do big things... they'll be keeping their data where they have control over it.
They don't trust it to the IT department, either. They're more likely to run, or own, the IT department. And they have your data. But you don't have theirs.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I am perpetually amazed by the blinding stupidity of people who think that if only you move "to the cloud" there is no more configuration or maintenance to be done for applications.
Just who does this fellow think maintains those cloud services?
The underpants gnomes?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
'As we move toward the cloud and technology gets easier to use, we'll have less need for full-time teams of people to maintain our stuff.'
Gavin Newsom, present. This guy is a political diva. Don't pay attention to him. His book and his overall schtick are pure self-promotion. In California, "lieutenant governor" means "guy who has no duties whatsoever and is there in case the governor dies or something."
"we'll have less need for full-time teams of people to maintain our stuff"
This statement illustrates beautifully the fact IT is necessary. That, or a printer will henceforth be known as "that messy thingie."
'As we move toward the cloud and technology gets easier to use...'
And who is going to administrate the "cloud"? Yeah, it's nicely removed, there is still quite a bit of manual work to be involved even with cloud solutions.
And just who is going to fix his shit when the cloud decides to do a Nemo, or it just evaporates? He really doesn't have a clue.
Bryan
Everything will be great while the citizen maintains their code and systems. What happens to society when that individual decides they no longer have the time to maintain the system? Does society have the right to slave them to the system maintenance? Are they a poor civic individual when they decide to drop a needed system?
Government is formed in an attempt (and not necessarily efficient) to reconcile the needs of the individual with the needs of the society. It is rare that Spock is right, that the needs of the many outweigh those of the few (or the one). But for those cases in which Spock IS right, libertarian ideals and individualistic determination will not save the society from destruction.
Security in the Cloud is harder, more experts needed.
Anyone that says security in the cloud is better hasn't been paying attention. Most cloud providers are months to years behind on patches. Yahoo was using a JVM fro 2007 still.
If you think godaddy or any other VPS provider is patching your systems, forget it. They might nag you to load a new version ... perhaps, maybe, but don't hold your breadth.
Other cloud providers suck your data in, but never give it back. After your people spend month - decades entering data into Salesforce, you can't get the data back out in a useful way.
That is certainly a cost savings, but it negates the reason we don't like other proprietary solutions. Now the organization is left renting services forever. Does anyone believe that leasing a car is cheaper than buying it?
Newsom: 'As we move toward the cloud and technology gets easier to use, we'll have less need for full-time teams of people to maintain our stuff.'
(Score:5, Funny)
At this point, after 5-6 years of hearing blowhards talk about clouds, I've just started to dare my boss to move stuff to the cloud. Seriously, do it or stop talking about it. But it won't happen. The minute there is a problem and they cant wake me up to fix it immediately, it would be brought back. So I tell my boss don't worry, I'll be hear when it comes back. Also, I've started to draw pretty clouds around our infrastructure drawings.
And who notices when all the corporate data you have, which can be accessed by anyone in the world with just a username and password, starts getting downloaded in central China, or Estonia?
Or who cares? That cloud provider lets you setup usernames and passwords, and tell you it's secure. Your employees go home, where they've recently downloaded "AVG Super Microsoft Spyware Buster Plus" for a small fee, and now your corporate data is available on bittorrent.
If you call that cloud provider and complain, they say "our users can work anywhere in the world, it's "the cloud
No matter if its off-site or on-site there needs to be a dedicated team watching the network and only that network, and ones that know it. otherwise your going to have downtime like crazy, and you need computers now more than ever. If anyone had a brain they would keep them on-site, and keep most stuff off the cloud. The cloud is good for a small percentage of certain applications but most of it if you want it to be efficient. Let IT Pros do what they do best. Tired of the penny pinching. In the long run will cost a lot more.
The one outsourced to CSC?
Yes, they get the economies of scale, while killing the supply of trained local competitors. Do you think they will share these economies with their customers?
Big contractor shops have economies of scale. Does this mean cheaper rates to hire them?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Please note that Mr. Newsom may be slightly biased about depending on IT. After all, he is the big swinging dick who got into a pissing contest with Terry Childs (a SanFran network admin) about needing passwords to the network. The guy flat out hates IT and has no appreciation for the complexity and delicacy of network setup and configuration. I am not saying that Mr. Childs was aboveboard, I think he behaved badly as well, but I understand Child's reluctance to turn over something to fools.
You never hear "lets get rid of doctors. With so much information at their fingertips nowadays, people can just diagnose themselves!"
All Childs did was lock down access to the network controllers; he had nothing to do with servers, databases, or applications despite rampent speculation. The only true in the entire paragraph is that Newsom was mayor at the time. Emails and payroll were not affected, nor were there any other service losses at the time.
referring to
"Newsom was mayor, of course, when city network engineer Terry Childs locked down San Francisco’s FiberWAN fiber-optic network and refused to give up the password. Freezing the network also stopped government emails and payroll. After days of outside contractors trying—and failing—to break into the system, Newsom finally had to march into Childs’ jail cell and practically beg him to surrender the 28-digit code. Whether that experience slanted Newsom against IT departments in general is hard to tell, but it’s clear from the book that he’s embraced cloud services as the way of the future. "
The main thing I took away from this episode is
1) do not let one person every have all of the control of your infrastructure
2) Newsom and his cronies are stupid, sadistic bullies who managed to send a unpleasant person to jail for multiple years by telling lies and continuing to lie and exaggerate about what Childs actually did. Every newspaper story at the time talked about different thing that Childs could have done, that he might have remote access to the network, and might have done this or maybe done that .
Doctors have a strong union.
Get. The. Fuck. Out. while you still can.
The cloud is coming. It is going to destroy your industry unless you work for a cloud startup. Box is looking at your SAN with big HTML 5 hard on.
Just saying.... the accountants will make this happen.
I call it Socialocracy http://jimijon.blogspot.com/2011/03/origins-of-socialocracy.html cheers
Mind | Body | Spirit | Cash
You don't speak for me Gavin. (you are part of that fuckin fascist Left Right Paradigm)
You can't plan an office network for ten years! (let alone assemble it - fuckin moron)
Your plan will lead to a dumbed down society. (techs will be ostracized for maintaining/running contrary shit to the establishment)
One where fascists steal and run everything. (like we have now with no more FDIC , and having your mother fucking segregated accounts " Corzoned " (another one who should be behind bars never to see the SUN again)
If you were smart you would put an end to this Delta Tunnel crap, and High Speed Rail crap, and Agenda 21 crap, and over regulation crap.
There's no jobs, because there's no certainty, because there's no banksters arrested, or even regulated one little tiny bit, nothing has changed, nobody is going to fucking hire people with this crap going on, obamacare going on. It's a fuckin police state. Your idea will lead to the web being essentially ran by oath breaking goons while gutting the fuck out of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
because the 'cloud' let's you put all the labor where ever it's cheapest. I seem to remember a fellow named Marx talking about that, but all anyone can remember about him is two or three dictators borrowed his rhetoric for their pogroms.
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Secondly, even though technology is much more common (particularly with the younger generations), technological sophistication is still fairly rare. The vast majority of people use the technology of their jobs in the most narrow ways possible, and further they expect technology to "just work". When it doesn't, they call on the IT guys, or they call on their uncommon coworkers like me who aren't in IT but are still the unofficial IT guys by virtue of having more than modest computer knowledge.
Gavin is one of the primary reasons California is melting down; this book is just a fund-raiser for his run for governor.
Regardless of you positions on gay marriage and illegal immigration (and the short-term joy or fury you may have felt about his actions on these issues) the fact remains that what he did was absolute lawlessness and a return to the ancient legal theory that the king is the law (i.e. if a leader does something, then it is right no matter what the laws say). For those outside of CA, Gavin Newsom used to be mayor of San Francisco (he's now lt. gov (#2 in executive branch of state govt)) and as Mayor of his city he simply decided to start conducting gay marriages (even though there was no law providing for such things) and he made the city a sanctuary for illegal aliens. Again, aside from you position on these political matters, the bigger question is: do you REALLY want your politicians completely ignoring the laws? If you answered "yes" then do you still hold that position if the politicians in power have views you hate? Sooner or later we all live under a politician we disagree with; it can be VERY dangerous to support people who think they are free to act extra-legally (and worse if the masses have previously validated them in such activities)
Newsom is an upscale lowlife who knows absolutely nothing about IT. Sounds like he picked up on a magazine article on a plane flight and now he knows everything I work in SF financial district every day doing IT and NO ONE outside fasionable cocktail parties are talking seriously about this. Maybe his dog groomer might consider a move to O365, but a city or a corporation? 1. Small companies see the cloud for real savings when they just need simple apps, email, and even simplier security controls. 2. Medium and up (+100 heads) have more complexity and sometimes an app or two in the cloud (Salesforce, MS CRM, Email or Spam filtering) makes sense, but the data really resides in house. So go with Office 365 and let go the Exchange guru who probably did a lot more and hire a guy to maintain the AD sync and coordinate with Salesforce, etc. when something is not flowing. You still need support and service maint. 3. Large companies talk about it like Newsom and only so they can hear themselve say cloud. No CIO is going to take risks while Amazon "goes down" or Azure "is having a bad day". Sorry, they have their own diesel contracts for their own facilities on company property. Big IT even uses SMTP services only if they really make sense. After having used hosted Exchange since 2002 I can say the hosts do hav a role, but they can not give us application customization our in house developers do with our in house core products. Really the question here is: can it ALL be moved to the cloud? Yes, for some and soon for everyone else who will yield control. Today your give your data to LinkedIn, tomorrow Google.......appcreep
Cloud technology has its place and it's here to stay without a doubt. The benefits it brings in a more connected world is undeniable. Just how much or how little to leverage it is debatable. But from what I see the greater population within "Citizenville" is just simply not technical enough to make needed technical decisions. They're savvy yes, they use the tools creatively yes, but everyone is still just not as technical as I they'd need to be to in order to be self sufficient. His attacks on IT likely reflect his real world experience working with his own IT departments that are slow to adapt and "behind the times" which is true for many IT departments, especially in the political arena. The problem is many people that work for government office have cushy jobs and stay there as "lifers". That sort of mentality breeds apathy across the board. And that's a shame because they make the rest of us look terrible. So in some ways I can't blame him for his own ignorance. The only exception to this is the defense and national security arenas. But again, if he were more technical he'd see the problems in his IT staff in plain sight. What he's saying is akin to saying we no longer needing mechanical and computer engineers because all of our manufacturing is automated these days anyway, the ignorance is obvious to those that know better.
Replaced entire justice system with Thunderdome: two men enter, one man leaves.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
He wants everything to be cloud based and then worries about privacy? Sorry brah, you can't have it both ways.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson