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Yep. It's cantankerous but gosh darn it, the field lacks something better.

> The CoCs are completely unnecessary

Where do you think they come from? The issues that people have to deal with at conferences aren't new [1] - and when the offender is a friend of the organizer, or works on their team, having a predefined process is good.

It also means that people can't say "I didn't know it wasn't ok to ____" or "XXX punishment is too harsh" - a common issue with poor actors. A CoC means you can take action with less effort and drama when someone is being a jerk.

1: http://jessnevins.com/blog/?p=796

Epic is likely not the vector for this sort of thing (it runs using a thin client); far easier to take advantage of unpatched machines.

Giving money is different than speaking. Do we have a right to anonymous speech amplified according to our means?

I don't think moving viral misinformation from chain e-mail to hyper-spread tweets via algorithm has improved the marketplace of ideas.

The block is only needed because of the amplification. If tweets and posts showed up chronologically vs from ML-driven engines to identifying the most grabbing content, we wouldn't be systemically hyper-charging emotionally hooking misinformation.

You don't need to unplug the bullhorn if there is no bullhorn.

I think this has been the policy for any/all books published without proper review.

This isn't accurate. The Russian DNC hacking and release was hugely impactful and timed to have a partisan impact.

100% - and even the best developer may not understand all of a user's needs until they get their hands on a prototype. We should always expect to learn and pivot as we learn more about users.

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That's true - there are lots of folks on the ground who know what's needed but can't get top cover to enact it.

This isn't a decision that can be made within the executive branch (I think). Congress would have to pass laws that enable "bureaucrats to get paid more."

I'd just push back - technology is a tool to accomplish the missions of government.

The positions that run those missions - enforcing the law, ruling on the law, running Medicare, etc etc - should be more prestigious. That said, if the government wants to have prestigious technical work, it should be more open to taking big swings (in an agile way) on hard problems, but that requires investment and taking risks.

This sort of thing is exactly what USDS works against. However, it won't be solved until federal agencies hire on people with the skillset to effectively manage technology.

He was my representative before redistricting.

If you don't know his story, it's worth taking the time. He got himself beat up to unconsciousness so that the rest of the United States would not be able to ignore the brutality of its racist South.

Nothing about how they are fixing their internal processes that enabled individual employees to do password resets. Can anyone at twitter get control of any account? That seems problematic.

This is not the first time Google has done this, for what its worth - simply the first time there's been widespread attention on it.

> The internet activity that Kemp’s staff described as hacking attempts was actually scans by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that the secretary of state’s office had agreed to, according to the GBI. Kemp’s chief information officer signed off on the DHS scans three months beforehand.

Making partisan hacking accusations without any shred of evidence or proof should have been disqualifying for the governor's campaign.

Apologies maintain norms and standards. They define the lines we shouldn't cross by noting areas where they were crossed.

We should reward apologies and punish those who don't. Our failure to do so is creating a market incentive that will destroy or weaken valuable norms.

Agreed, but when the talent isn't there, its easy for "helped supervise a contract to deliver X" to get equated with "expertise in X." Expertise is also needed to know what are big problems in a RFQ response, vs small problems. There's a tendency sometimes without that expertise to make a list and whichever team has the most +'s and least -'s to win out.

In order to outsource effectively, though, you need the ability to judge which vendors are strongest. I think there's been a pattern of thinking technical talent isn't needed when outsourcing when the opposite is true.

This happens. I've also seen cases where the vendor, by contract, does not permit government staff outside of 1-2 people from viewing the source code.

> But a lot of the US is not like this-- school districts, municipal and county government, etc would do pretty poorly to follow some parts of these guidelines, and quite well served to follow others.

True - I think the playbook is specifically oriented to state government folks - not as much municipal or county.

> I've too often seen someone take a document like this to justify maintaining a custom built municipal accounting system

Please feel free to submit a PR to help make that clearer! I would only say that some COTS solutions can also end up in a "no one knows how to maintain this" after enough custom code has been added.

Happy to help answer questions about this (or direct them to the authors!)

It's more accurate (IMO) to say the two have really different operating models. 18F is funded via cost recovery - agencies have to pay per project via an official agreement between agencies for the work (which can make it harder to do a project). USDS is funded via congressional appropriation, so doesn't need the same types of agreements.

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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in the federal government is hiring product managers (I believe its the first time that CMS has posted with this position title).

It's in WOODLAWN, MARYLAND, but some of the multiple openings at CMS won't require in office work most days of the week. The role would work for people that are relatively junior (with at least one year of professional experience), but there's also room for someone senior to make a big mark at an agency that processes the 1.5 billion/day in Medicare payments, in addition to supporting Medicaid, CHIP, and many other services.

> Like much enterprise software, the people who decide to buy it are not the people that use it.

Hard agree. There's also an incentive for hospital systems to "hold onto" patient data, which is not great.

I don't see that insinuation in the article. It says he was part of a bad tone and that his actions had a negative impact on an untold number of women, but that's a far cry from what you said above.

The VA's old system (VistA) is that open source solution - but other hospitals didn't want to use or buy it.

I think the EMR industry is driven more by safety, liability, and revenue for hospitals (in that order) than by patient/physician desired features or security.

It's also difficult to build tooling that interconnects across all of the medical specialties - and with the amount of customization that some providers want.

> Places where no one is sure who owns what, or who is responsible for what are unlikely to have proper monitoring and much more likely to be two or three upgrades behind. The seams are where things get lost, sometimes for years. So if your mandate is security or availability the seams are your best bet of finding a big pay off.

So true. Sometimes there's a person behind the scenes keeping it all working with bailing wire and elbow grease, but that person is also a huge point of failure.