Very interesting. A trove of experience and practical knowledge.
They were able to anticipate most of the loss scenarios in advance because they saw that logical arguments were not prevailing; when that happens, ""there's only one explanation and that's an alternative motive"". His ""number one recommendation"" is to ensure, even before the project gets started, that it has the right champion and backing inside the agency or organization; that is the real determiner for whether a project will succeed or fail.
Not very surprising, but still tragic and sad.
Damn Mexico is going to be more progressive than the US soon if it isn't already. I've been frustrated with house prices in the US too.
- Mexico already was. If you don't know that you've fallen for bigoted US propaganda.
  
  I didn't know that.
Woah, this is great!
A lot of these things ring true from my experience in the US government as well. There is a lot of waste from contracting and a lot of fear of the unknown.
There should be a community that documents these kinds of things, so that governments from around the world can have a repository of knowledge for these things. "I'm a government instance that does X and would like to find software that does Y for me. What could exist? Let me look at $repository". Without it, every government has to relearn the same lessons.
The knowledge shouldn't just end up in some article on lwn or whatever, but in the hands of people trying to convince their governments (local to national to international). The EU has something like that, but it's not well managed and there doesn't seem to be an NGO, at least to my knowledge, that does this kind of thing either. I might of course be mistaken.
Anti Commercial-AI license
- You'd think that a government knows how to do a web search
  
  That's easy to say. Do you think the Italian government is going to find an article written in Hindi on the experiences it made with open source education? Or that small towns are going to have the budget to go deeper than the first page on Google that ignored the internet archive?
  If it really were that simple and it worked, we wouldn't have to convince governments to use open source.
  Anti Commercial-AI license

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