Palmer Events Center
Crowd Genius? Or Groupthink?
RECEIVED Thu., June 4, 2009
Dear Editor,
Re: "The Genius of the Crowd ... Source" [News, June 5]: Genius of the crowd? Or groupthink? When we get City Council killing a project based on a few dozen squeaky Tweets, we'll really bring government to a standstill.
It all sounds so good and happy on paper, this crowdsourcing hooey with its technical hand-waving, until someone actually has to build, test, and maintain 42 different SQL queries that talk to some legacy, proprietary database – for one city department. (Cleanup on aisle 10. "No way. I don't do 10." – the Gourds.) How about the dozens of meetings for that one department to figure out the business logic of who has view, edit, and publish rights for that department's area of the website? Is that logic already built into the Plone system? Has staff been trained on the Plone system? Maybe there's a reason that was a requirement.
This will be an ugly, complicated technical challenge and an equally ugly, complicated business challenge. So many different departments, databases, constituencies, and approval chains. Let's get legal involved too. Think there are any privacy issues here with granting citizen volunteers access to fund financial information, crime incident reports, payroll, Social Security numbers, etc.?
Methinks $800,000 is a bargain and would have been gladly paid to any company not based in the Silicon Valley. Say Austin-based Vignette, the world leader in CMS, curiously silent in this. No doubt they steered clear of this train wreck for a reason.
"Hurley has since stepped down from the … organization team." Nice. Thanks for slipping the new website out 3 years.
Re: "The Genius of the Crowd ... Source" [News, June 5]: Genius of the crowd? Or groupthink? When we get City Council killing a project based on a few dozen squeaky Tweets, we'll really bring government to a standstill.
It all sounds so good and happy on paper, this crowdsourcing hooey with its technical hand-waving, until someone actually has to build, test, and maintain 42 different SQL queries that talk to some legacy, proprietary database – for one city department. (Cleanup on aisle 10. "No way. I don't do 10." – the Gourds.) How about the dozens of meetings for that one department to figure out the business logic of who has view, edit, and publish rights for that department's area of the website? Is that logic already built into the Plone system? Has staff been trained on the Plone system? Maybe there's a reason that was a requirement.
This will be an ugly, complicated technical challenge and an equally ugly, complicated business challenge. So many different departments, databases, constituencies, and approval chains. Let's get legal involved too. Think there are any privacy issues here with granting citizen volunteers access to fund financial information, crime incident reports, payroll, Social Security numbers, etc.?
Methinks $800,000 is a bargain and would have been gladly paid to any company not based in the Silicon Valley. Say Austin-based Vignette, the world leader in CMS, curiously silent in this. No doubt they steered clear of this train wreck for a reason.
"Hurley has since stepped down from the … organization team." Nice. Thanks for slipping the new website out 3 years.
Bill Kilday