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Comment by mrighele | Hacker News Reader

Bureaucracy should be treated as a computer program, you have to feed it exactly what it expects. If you give to a JSON parser an object with single quoted strings it is your fault if the parser complains even though it is quite clear what you meant.

In the case of software, being clever means that you open yourself to unintended result, vulnerabilities and such, in the case of bureaucracy you open yourself to lawsuits, corruotion charges and lenghty trials

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No, you expect bureaucracy to be helpful and resist when they are acting as harmful to the spirit of the law. Otherwise you get a nightmare state akin to Soviet Union.

You're right but that doesn't invidate what i said. I am not talking about how a bureaucracy should work, but how you should approach it.

Of course a helpful bureacracy will ask feedback in order not to waste your work, but unless you know how it will work expect the worst and act accordingly

This is obviously true and also irrelevant. Everyone knows that it's better to adhere to the minutiae: no one is suggesting you shouldn't put forth your best effort to do so. The complaint here is that the bureaucracy is so sensitive to those minutiae.

Perhaps one day bureaucracies will accept proposals via JSON (or other open data format... XML anyone?) rather than Word or PDF.

One could argue that these formats are more accessible than their equivalent pseudo-paper formats. It would eliminate the nitpicking over document format, as the low bar to enter would be enforced programmatically.

This would allow technologists with lesser experience in the minutia of proposal writing to compete with huge government contractors with specialists who deal in final proposal preparation. At least it would in the short term until the big contractors retooled.

I don't buy this. The government has more resources to fix UX readibility more than any other company, and I know how nitpicky a HN reader can get on UX details. So why should the government get a pass? It won't get better unless we raise our voices to the point it is heard by them.

Local governments are independent in the US and don’t operate at huge scales. Further, their independently implementing laws written by a separate group so correctness is placed well above UX.

Sadly, politics only cares for people actively involved. If you want different behavior, communicate with an elected official, try to elect different people, or run for office yourself.

There are almost 90,000 governments in the United States. Each of them maintains x websites.

That is a lot of UX designers.

> Bureaucracy should be treated as a computer program, you have to feed it exactly what it expects.

If what it expects had an exhaustive formal spec and also an automatic validator, that would work better.

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