[Evangelism] Austin fiasco
Matt Hamilton
What is the best way of us handling this? That article makes some
harsh comments about Plone. If Plone were some large corporate I would
imagine that lawyers would be swinging into action now.
Do we want to publish some kind of official statement in response? Or
privately contact that newspaper and ask them to retract their
comment. It is a quote though so I don't know legal standing. Or do we
just keep our head down and not draw attention to it?
http://www.statesman.com/news/texas/local-firm-to-start-city-web-site-redesign-129437.html
-Matt
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Steve McMahon
Mark A Corum
shoes. This has nothing to do with Plone being deficient, and
everything to do with would be politicos wanting to seem sensitive by
buying locally.
Anything we could possibly say has already been said by residents of
the community - read the comments to this article if you have any
doubt:
The press lives by maximizing the number of people looking at their
pages. Anything you do to go after them just adds eyeballs. Its the
perfect example of the old adage - "Never wrestle with a pig - you
both get dirty - and the pig likes it."
Austin is spending $357,000 to analyse what their website needs in
order to succeed. I'll be interesting in seeing the outcome of that -
as well as the price tag of the actual site when it goes out for bids.
Mark
Dylan Jay
governments. All it takes is one person to kick up a stink like a
bitter vendor and the governments procurement processes become a
politcal issue, fairly or unfairly.
This is why governments avoid taking risks even when its clearly a
better solution. For anyone thats tried to sell to government and
wondered why they have these really long painful tendering,
preselected vendors etc that "attempt" to avoid any vendor/technology
bias, this is why. You won't often find tenders that state a
technology specifically unless its "beyond reproach" like "microsoft".
My question is, what was in the tender requirements that a Plone
solution was going to cost 750K?
Another take home idea from this: if your government is putting out
tenders that exclude opensource and Plone specifically, creating waves
can get results. Especially if you can link it to jobs going elsewhere.
Dylan Jay
On 21/12/2009, at 12:28 PM, Dylan Jay wrote:
> ...
> Another take home idea from this: if your government is putting out
> tenders that exclude opensource and Plone specifically, creating
> waves can get results. Especially if you can link it to jobs going
> elsewhere.
My use of the words "creating waves" is a little too strong for what I
meant. The way in which we and others in opensource here have done
this is to talk to those in government about removing requirements in
their procurement processes that specifically excluded opensource
solutions. Government to some extent have been responsive to this.
This has taken a long time and is really just about helping them
understand that other models exist and they can get significant
benefits by considering them fairly along with their existing
solutions. Governments respond to the concept of openness and fairness
(and some may respond to the concept of local jobs but that hasn't
been our experience). They respond precisely because they want to
avoid what happened in Austin.
I didn't mean to suggest what those Austin guys did was the right way
of going about it. If the tender has been written it's generally too
late to do anything.
