So Much For Transparency

[finknottle]

I'm not excusing it. It's !@#$ed up. It's also par for the course for the government. Two-thirds of those tax dollars are spent making sure your tax dollars aren't being wasted.

 

Absolutely true. People do not appreciate the actual cost that comes with 'not wasting your tax dollars.' A paper-clip bought through a fair and transparent bidding process from companies who have desirable ownership demographics, support unions in the workplace and have a dozen other boxes checked, will provide an acceptable infrastructure for monitoring the paper-clip aquisition process to your satisfaction, and stands prepared to alter it's design halfway through the process becomes a very expensive paperclip indeed.

 

Did you read the functional specs (the unredacted, at least) in the document? That's not a simple application. Even after accounting for the some of the ridiculous unnecessary complexity they defined (again...four different database systems?

:

The real problem is that the project is WAY the hell over-engineered - which is also what you're complaining about. There's no need to make it as complex as they did. But for the deliverables (which isn't just the site) specified...that price is probably about right. The deliverables just suck.

 

I admit that I had not. I based my assessment on what I see functionally at recovery.org, and what is needed for the task: a simple public repository for spending updates. That is what people were hollaring for, not a safe secure website implementing a million federal recommendations... I just skimmed their proposal: complete over-kill. The price is probably right - indeed, the government is pretty good at getting a fair price. Their failing generally lies with building in unreasonable requirements and process.

 

IMO it stands as an ironic commentry on the stimulus package itself. The site intended to show that our money is being spent wisely - paid for with stimulus funding - is a bloated over-engineered ediface costing 20 times what it could.

[pBills]

Speaking of transparency, Obama's spokesmen are the very picture of transparency...

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBCFkVJWyeU

 

 

 

Obama's "Snitch on your Fellow Amercian" website goes up and suddenly David Axelrod is sending out mass unsolicited emails to Obama dissenters. But of course their not collecting names or making enemy lists or anything like that.

 

 

What a frightening world this must be for you. Enemy list. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

[Fezmid]

Yes, it might be a bit overpriced... But people screaming that they could run the site for $1.99 and a stick of chewing gum are way off base as well. It's like the people in companies who say, "I need more disk space! Why does it cost so much here when I can go to Best Buy and get a drive for $100!" There's a LOT more to it, and the list of technical requirements bears that out. 24x7 support (meaning 24x7 support contracts, which are NOT cheap), an IDS system, backup systems, load balancers, security scanning, monitoring, SAN, redundancy, etc, etc. It all does add up. And the company needs to make a profit as well -- you want them to do all this work and take on this risk for a $50/year profit? Not likely.

 

Be upset about the redactions, but the cost isn't completely out of the ballpark for a project like this... Well, at least from what I can tell through all of the black pages.

[Kelly the Dog]

Yes, it might be a bit overpriced... But people screaming that they could run the site for $1.99 and a stick of chewing gum are way off base as well. It's like the people in companies who say, "I need more disk space! Why does it cost so much here when I can go to Best Buy and get a drive for $100!" There's a LOT more to it, and the list of technical requirements bears that out. 24x7 support (meaning 24x7 support contracts, which are NOT cheap), an IDS system, backup systems, load balancers, security scanning, monitoring, SAN, redundancy, etc, etc. It all does add up. And the company needs to make a profit as well -- you want them to do all this work and take on this risk for a $50/year profit? Not likely.

 

Be upset about the redactions, but the cost isn't completely out of the ballpark for a project like this... Well, at least from what I can tell through all of the black pages.

It's also for six years and I would imagine that the security costs are extraordinary.

 

In honor of DC Tom's mantra of "I'd still hit it"... "It still seems like a lot."

[finknottle]

Yes, it might be a bit overpriced... But people screaming that they could run the site for $1.99 and a stick of chewing gum are way off base as well. It's like the people in companies who say, "I need more disk space! Why does it cost so much here when I can go to Best Buy and get a drive for $100!" There's a LOT more to it, and the list of technical requirements bears that out. 24x7 support (meaning 24x7 support contracts, which are NOT cheap), an IDS system, backup systems, load balancers, security scanning, monitoring, SAN, redundancy, etc, etc. It all does add up. And the company needs to make a profit as well -- you want them to do all this work and take on this risk for a $50/year profit? Not likely.

 

Be upset about the redactions, but the cost isn't completely out of the ballpark for a project like this... Well, at least from what I can tell through all of the black pages.

 

The price is reasonable. But is this the project that is required?

 

What people wanted and what they were promised was a place where they could go to and see how their money was being spent. A glorified news portal, basically, searchable by locality. Why must you have your own servers, IDS, etc? Why isn't hosting by a commercial service enough? Tell me what it is about this application - defined by it's intended purpose, not by the specs - that makes it more challenging than a site like realclearpolitics, which both links political news as well as extensively tabulates polling data? Or are you suggesting that realclearpolitics spends more than $3 million dollars a year on the website itself?

[finknottle]

It's also for six years and I would imagine that the security costs are extraordinary.

 

Why are the security costs extensive? Are there special security costs associated with posting unclassified data?

 

Or are you suggesting that the government can't do something straight-forward without it costing 10 times as much as a commercial company?

[DC Tom]

I build websites for a living......I could round up a full creative team, programmers and host half the !@#$ing Internet for a year for $18,000,000. And that includes updates to the site. And oh....half that $$$ would go to buying ads and paid search.

 

Even with the streaming videos, maps and other bells and whistles, thats an ridiculously priced project.

 

I build government web sites for a living. The price is reasonable. The goverment is what's ridiculous.

[Fezmid]

I build websites for a living......I could round up a full creative team, programmers and host half the !@#$ing Internet for a year for $18,000,000. And that includes updates to the site. And oh....half that $ would go to buying ads and paid search.

 

With a 99.9% SLA?

 

With enterprise-class hardware and software?

 

No you couldn't.

[DC Tom]

99.% uptime and 24/7 response to any outages is STANDARD.

 

And the creative on that site? Ten grand. TOPS.

 

[swede316]

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF...00-3961301.html

 

I'd start here....A page that size would only need one rack of these maybe two for redundancy. A little over 100K.

Each server can handle 1000 users per minute. Probably waaay more than would check the site anyhow.

 

Throw in the racks, PDU's and a 3700 series Cisco and now were around $250K.

[DC Tom]

Yeah, huh?

 

So this AM I called the lead engineer (and owner) of the vendor I use for all my sites. They are a fairly sized interactive shop here. Creative, app programming and hosting. Their guaranteed uptime? 99.99% for all sites. STANDARD. AND they do work for a major bank, which means they have to handle all the site standards for readability and backend data security. We looked at recover.gov over the phone and she said $18 Million is MORE than a joke...its obscene.

 

So , indeed....to the issue of cost AND that argument about uptime.

 

Do they maintain the bank's data?

[DC Tom]

Collect and store, transfer and maintainence.

 

Look...Im not arguing whether or not revovery.org isnt a big, robust site that costs a lot to build and maintain. It is....but $18 Million is assinine. Beyond assinine.

 

No the management overhead is asinine. $18M is right in line with that.

 

You want to complain about something? Complain about the right thing.

[DC Tom]

I cant read who is going to manage the project. Its all !@#$ing redacted.

 

If it even approaches a normal government project, they have about four people at Treasury - the CIO, whatever manager they put in charge of the stimulus package, a PM or COTAR for the project, and at least one (and probably more) internal technical resource. They also have a separate contractor acting as the PMO (which is at least three "managers"), and probably a completely separate contractor acting as the security experts (at least two "managers'). Then the consulting company tasked with making the site has at least three managers (their PM, and a delivery manager and a contract manager).

 

At least half those people are probably useless. Half the rest are only useful because the government outsourced everything two decades ago and maintains absolutely no project management ability in-house.

 

And I've worked on projects that were far, far worse than what I just outlined. The project I just finished had twenty-five managers and four "managing partners" that I know of involved in the project on a daily basis, and wasn't much bigger than the recovery.org web site. We actually had more managers than technical staff.