0.0 Context Setting

Wednesday, 9 October 2024 in Portland, Oregon, where it is still unseasonably warm. I have a puppy now. She’s a good girl.

0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord

Hallway Track 010: Let’s Fix Government Procurement (in the U.S.) is on Wednesday 16 October, at 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern.

Our guests will be:

• Kathrin Frauscher, co-founder and Deputy Executive Director of the Open Contracting Partnership.
• Ryan Ko, freelance consultant, co-author of this report, principal of RKO Consulting LLC, former Chief of Staff at Code for America, works with a portfolio of governments and non-profits to build a more human centered government.
• TBC.

Here’s the blurb:

Nobody is happy, and everyone is making do. That’s how a whole bunch of people feel about how procurement works with governments in the U.S.

Procurement is big money (over $4.4 trillion spent every year!). It’s also democracy in action, because procurement is how governments buy the goods and services as part of our social contract.

It’s also a big mess that could be much, much better. It works – just, and despite the efforts of everyone involved.

Come to this Hallway Track to hear about Bringing a human-centered approach to government procurement technology, a policy memo co-written by Dan, Ryan, and Kathrin about topics like:

• what the authors learned over the past 6 months about how procurement tech works in the U.S.;
• why things are broken and ideas about how the entire situation might be improved;
• the familiar and true refrain it’s always a people problem, not a technology problem;
• why standards matter, even when that xkcd cartoon is true; and
• group therapy, to be honest.

What’s Hallway Track, if you’ve forgotten or I never told you?

Hallway Track is a series of free, ad-hoc gatherings, where we pretend to be in the hallway chatting with each other after a great conference session. It’s for small groups of only 25 people so it’s not too big people can’t talk and not too small there’s dead air; they run for 90 minutes; they’re not recorded, to encourage free conversation.

Register for Hallway Track 010: Let’s Fix Government Procurement (in the U.S.) and find out more.

Pulling the Cord, my workshop about diverting government technology projects is now open for registration:

Pulling the Cord for the Private sector is now open for registration for Tuesday 29 October, at 10am Pacific and 1pm Eastern. 15 spaces only, at $360 each.

Pulling the Cord for Government and Non-Profits is now open for registration for Friday 1 November, at 10am and 1pm Eastern. 15 spaces only, at $260 each.

Find out more about Pulling the Cord, the best plain-speaking guide to stopping traditional technology procurement, before it leaves the station.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 Product management is hard, a reminder

Here’s your regular reminder if you work in not-the-private-sector that Modernizing Legacy Applications is Hard, and that people who do this kind of thing for money aren’t automatically better at it.

After having a fairly disastrous launch of the Sonos’ new app, their CEO has now resorted to the tactic of radical transparency and published (what claims to be) a public Trello board of the app roadmap⁴, presumably to mollify all the people on the internet (i.e. everyone in the world, now) who Weren’t Consulted⁵.

1.2 Shadow IT

This is fantastic! Via Metafilter², the Navy Times headline is How Navy chiefs conspired to get themselves illegal warship Wi-Fi³ gives the game away, but I think it’s an amazing illustration of:

• how much people need internet access
• the lengths to which they’re willing to go for internet access
• something about the staffing issues the U.S. Navy has in that the only real repercussions for (handwaving) something something opsec is “you’re demoted”, which doesn’t sound like a terrible thing in the grand scheme of things

There’s all the regular shadow IT stuff like “installed an application that you don’t know about” and “made a spreadsheet that’s critical to running the entire operation” plus “we put a server on a credit card under this desk because you have a terrible cloud policy”¹

That’s it for today. It’s been a while. Things have been... difficult, to be honest.

How have you been?

Best,

Dan

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