Dave Lane 
🇳🇿Crikey. Wonder what their 'success metrics' looked like. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/ldr/498118/it-upgrade-costs-rotorua-council-about-14-point-9m-more-than-originally-budgeted This seems like part of the same epidemic that we're seeing everywhere else. Gov't bureaucrats buying into the 'off-the-shelf' myth. We need better people who know stuff as the customers. Consultants are seldom without vested interests.
I'm starting to hatch a plan where a group of professional *#LibreSoftware* adherents stage an intervention at #LGNZ (the Local Gov't Agency) & require all council digital tech procurement staff to do a course on *how the digital world/business really works* (which we will develop) & then they have to reapply for their roles before they can waste another cent of taxpayer $. Because the current crop give absolutely no indication of being competent. We haven't got time for more of this shit.
Also, we need NZGOAL-SE to become more than 'a recommendation'. We need gov't to stop buying proprietary software. The status quo is ample evidence that current practice is a failure.
Bill Bennett@lightweight You’d probably get political support for that from a surprising quarter:
@billbennett heh (thanks for the quote 😎 ) - yeah, I've noticed that (although haven't heard ACT mention it since... and they've adopted NationBuilder like all the other monkey-see-monkey-do parties). I wrote this a while back - the NBR among others thought it was a good idea: https://davelane.nz/procurement
@lightweight I re-read my story and found it riddled with typos… mainly because I had to manually restore it while rebuilding my site and the previous edits got lost along the way - another argument for open tools ;)
@lightweight Ha.. I read that procurement story before, but it is worth repeating.
One angle I’ve come across a number of times is when a big tech company actually gets to write the tender. I haven’t heard of it in the last few years mainly because the industry is less leaky than it used to be. In part this is because there isn’t enough media scrutiny of the sector.
@billbennett yup. We need people directing a lot more sunlight at these very shady folks and their practices. There are a lot of remarkably unethical people engaging with government.
Dick Smiths Fair Go SupportersMaybe ask @dcent, who ran in #Adelaide in #SouthAustralia for local govt on a platform of replacing proprietary software with #FOSS. They had a lot of interesting ideas, not just that obviously.
If memory serves they got about 5% of the vote, but they might have ideas on how to do better.