Joe Biden got in touch with me today -- well, alright, he sent me a mail-bot about a vote on whitehouse.gov called the SAVE Award.
I had to pinch myself to see if it was real -- I had just been bitching everywhere that Drupaly whitehouse.gov doesn't have interactivity and votes -- and here was one coming right into my personal mail box from Joe Biden! I may come to love our Wired State.
Now, to be sure, this vote wasn't anything substantive, like, say, "Should we have sanctions against Iran or not"? -- here's a group that says "no"
(I give you that link to help you think through the issues, but it's not one I would sign because of the moral equivalency problem that *might* have been fixed by putting "the nature of the regime is not the issue".)
The whitehouse.gov contest was about...how there was some contest to see if some bureaucrats could save money and they picked four finalists.
Well, I'm up for that! I'm all for saving our tax dollars at work.
So I surfed on over to the site with the contestants, and now I have to lobby you to vote for the one that involves SAVING MONEY OFFLINE, NOT ONLINE:
Marjorie Cook of Gobles, Michigan
Food inspector in USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS)
This gal discovered that for some odd reasons these empty containers were being mailed back Express Mail -- needlessly -- just because somebody thought filling out two different forms was too much bother, I guess. So she suggested they stop doing it to save money -- and I'm going to ask whether they needed to ship them express mail in the first place if they have dry ice -- but I'll accept the savings where they've been found and vote YES.
Now, why won't I vote for the other ONLINE savings concepts, i.e. moving paper online?
Am I surly, filled with FUD, and a Luddite regarding technology? Nope.
I just think there needs to be more study and justification for moving various functions online -- and there never is, so if I can put my spoke in the wheel for a minute on this, I will.
There is this typical geeky accepted wisdom here in the other choices that "requiring mine operations to report online" is something that "saves lives" -- just because it seems streamlined from some perspective and seems like, well, it *ought* to save lives. (But does it? Says a still small voice.)
Seriously, what if it doesn't? What if it turns out you make people pay attention better if they have to look at what they are doing -- the mine -- and use their hand and a pencil to write a report or fill out check boxes on a paper form -- instead of having their nose in a laptop the whole time? What if putting something online makes for more error, more "down time"?
Or take "post public notice for seized property online, not in newspapers" -- whether you put an ad in a newspaper, which is done electronically even for paper versions, or online on a web page, you still need the same staff time to capture the info and maintain and update it. And it's not clear how this saves money for storing seized goods (?).
And then there's the calculation that never enters the geek equation, really: "Down time" -- "System of a down" like the Russians says -- all the times the system doesn't work, is "down," and not there for you, and you are dependent on it. The paper systems are never down. The online systems are -- too often.
The cost of converting these reporting systems now to online regimes isn't calculated -- that doesn't save money, that spends money on equipment, programmers, training, um, yeah, even if you foist one of those "free" "open gov" solutions for, say, the "repo stack" of seized property.
There's another aspect of all this, and that is not only data entry error and user enter but the sheer tangled snafus that result when things are put online and no one fixes them and they replicate. I've frequently had situations where in schools and hospitals two files are made because of a name mispelling, and they aren't merged, and they are treated as separate people. It can be hella hard to get them to be merged.
Or take this sort of thing. You go to the doctor, and he pulls up the wrong person based on a similar name, and begins to tell you about the test results of a completely different person.
Or another time, you are sitting with one child, and the doctor is giving you instructions and health suggestions based on...the other child. You keep nudging him and telling him he's got the two mixed up. You bring both children into the room and show them how they are different, different ages, weights, etc.
And he keeps staring at his computer screen, and not the children, as if the answers might be found there. I swear to God, I have had this happen too many times not to be protesting it regularly as a systemic issue: the over-reliance of an online data entry and record-keeping system that just isn't adapting to human situations.
Think of how many times you go somewhere and are told "you aren't in the computer" i.e. they can't find you because of error or "the system is down so they can't access that now" -- a refund, a pass into a building, whatever it is. And...you think mining safety *improves* when you report on it *this way, with this endemic problem*?
There was an OB-GYN I had who lost his license to practice because while he was handling a difficult delivery involving the use of a new high-tech machine, he let the salesman of the machine handle the machine because it was complicated. It didn't work. The patient died. Do you think everybody was happy they had digitalized and mechanized health that day?
No fair saying that for every one of those sorts of horrors, the machines that find the tumours or heartbeats are life-saving. Because it's both, but nobody really thinks about both parts. I just never see any accurate, journalistic or scientific reporting about what our lives really have become with "online" "saving lives".
The woman who has a way to save postage with the real world of delivery canisters has found a real way to save money that is bullet-proof -- there is no hidden balloon payment from consultants, there is no mystery, there is no experimenting. We won't be widgeting and wiring the way we will have to do with the plan to put property seizures and mining reports online.
But guess what. I can tell you in advance which one will win -- well, make an educated guess knowing our Wired Whitehouse. Because remember, the prize is you get to sit down with the president to talk about your idea. Do you think the handlers want to spend the president's time having Marj talk about how the canister from the salmonella test could go back by surface mail instead of express? Of course not.
What his handlers -- and he -- will want to talk about is how an online solution saved money, especially if they can inject an open source doctrine into the mix.
I'm going to bet the winner will be:
Paul Behe of Cleveland, Ohio
Paralegal Specialist for DHS
with the idea to put the seized property online -- counterfeit watches and bags and stuff.
You know why? Because those who want to expose the DHS as unnecessary or harmful will like the idea of showing it up as seizing property from hapless day trippers and would-be immigrants. They will also want to show up how "evil" it is to make these poor people lose "their" property merely because they are ripped copies of Gucci bags. They will see this as a copyleftist submission -- and it may well be. See enough reports of DHS seizing fake Gucci bags, and someone will say, "Let the bags go, let the migrants make a buck, let's concentrate on...Koran burners instead."
Well, as I've been saying. The White House is familiar with real meat-world voting -- and how.
But the world of electronic voting online is something they are only very, very gingerly touching. And so they have a lame thing up with this, and they have to learn the most important thing about fair votes: framing the issue.
Not a single one of these entries tells us *how much money* they will save.
P.S. Oh, and forget about trying to express your views on the 2,000 *other* ideas *unless you have an organizational email* to register for the site.
I don't have one; I'm a freelancer. It won't accept registeration with "yahoo" or "verizon". I have access to several organizational emails, but I'd be reluctant to use them for a "non work" purpose like this not part of the job or the mandate.
Their loss.
This was some hairy geek's idea of protecting them from alts and spam.
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