As an Oregonian, this whole episode irritates me to no end; the fact that I'm shoving an application into this meatgrinder is just insult piled onto injury.

State and local governments should learn from this and other episodes ( our failed DMV upgrade from a few years back for instance ); that an RFP and a procurement process that eats 5% of the budget before anything actually happens is bound to betray the public trust.

While I'd like to think that there was an easy solution; say appointing an 'implementation czar' and requiring open source solutions be the default. I don't fool myself as to the likelihood of that working any better.

Governments are human nature magnified and focused and as such they have all the human frailties; not to mention that everyone involved is pushing and pulling in a different direction.

That said; I do believe that all government IT projects should be open sourcing everything they do or have done for them ( not the data, the functionality ) so that it is open to public review and provides the possibility for public improvement.

At the very least if that $43 Million had been spent on something that left a github repository behind; Oregonians would have something to show for that money...