Lol at the copyright notice at the bottom.
I notice the app is made by Booz Allen Hamilton. It's a shame we have to farm this stuff out to contractors and not use the USDS or 18F.
I notice the app is made by Booz Allen Hamilton. It's a shame we have to farm this stuff out to contractors and not use the USDS or 18F.
My takeaway from watching this whole RFP process play out is that an early impactful leverage point is having USDS get involved in auditing/writing RFP requirements in the public interest (this was quite a few years ago, so they may already be more involved in all tech contracting decisions).
Without having a technically strong government team weighing in on contracting, I get the feeling that language and technical expertise falls on contractors/corporations/lobbyists to provide.
I worked on a project once with the national park service. Their Office of General Council or whatever its called didn't want to agree to make their metadata on https://npgallery.nps.gov available to use with a CC0 license for use in https://dp.la/ . Sure, the images might not have been taken by federal employees, but why try to assert copyright ownership in the metadata? Eventually they agreed for one collection, but they have lots of cool content on there from California parks we would like to put on https://calisphere.org .
The stuff they have up at Clemson has CC0 metadata, and the rights info for the content is pretty clearly marked https://openparksnetwork.org/about/opn-rights/
Duration of the performance-based contract will be three and a half years, with a total potential value of $128 million. It provides for additional options of up to 10 years.
https://gcn.com/Articles/2004/08/09/USDA-awards-contract-for...
Sooooo yeah.
We can pay people to build it directly, it's ok. There doesn't need to be an unaccountable greased palm making $100 million in the background through some "public-private partnership".
If the contractor makes a profit we pay more. If instead the government makes a profit, we pay less (see public banking for an example). Kinda funny how that works.
Norway uses one for their pension program (AUM of > $1 trillion, owning over 1.4% of the global stock market, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...)
My favorite one, however, was created by Ronald Reagan, the United States Mint Commemorative Coin Program:
> Since the modern commemorative coin program began in 1982, the United States Mint has raised more than $506,301,189 in surcharges to help build new museums, maintain national monuments... and much more.
https://www.usmint.gov/news/inside-the-mint/commemorative-co...
Honestly a world where the government has, say a commercial for-profit version of NPR, high speed internet, etc, that coexists with other current offerings and then re-invests that into government programs and needs less tax dollars from me sounds like a great idea. Tax payer money already paid for most of the infrastructure, we might as well profit from it.
There's some odd political animosity to it however, as if asking for a tax-payer owned version of NBC with some entertaining primetime shows is like some kind of slippery slope to autocratic socialism ... it's actually bringing capitalism into the government like never before and allowing them to say, not have to ask me to vote on raising my sales tax to build a train. Instead they ask us how we want to use all those sweet profits.
... it'd be nice ...
Thanks, fixed.
And to your original comment. I'd also love to see the government building out solid technical teams for provision of services. I'm also a firm believer that for _some_ government functions, there's a strong argument for "government as a platform". Rec.gov is a great test bed for this; among many reasons it's (mostly) politically impartial, so is less.
For at least the online portion of parks reservation, we really want to be offering availability and booking via API, and incentivizing 3rd parties to compete on experience (UI/UX, etc.).
It gets tricky because this is newer terrain and areas like "who pays for support costs/requests" is still being hashed out.
Note: still important to have the government providing the base layer of functionality. Accessibility is important and capitalism won't solve for every piece of product minutia that government should provide.