Special interest isn't some kind of singular evil, it's whenever someone's interest aren't perfectly aligned with the community. It's easy to fixate on the big

Special interest isn't some kind of singular evil, it's whenever someone's interest aren't perfectly aligned with the community. It's easy to fixate on the big ticket stuff such as outright corruption, nepotism and so on, but it's also about a general dynamic that exist benignly at all levels of bureaucratic organisations: discovering the public interest gets increasingly difficult the deeper into the details you get + I'd like to be seen to be doing a good job to advance my career. Is fixing this or that pothole first more in the public interest? The citizen with the persistent letters to the right people (and/or the influential blog/the ability/luck to make a Facebook post viral) typically gets to decide. This dynamic scales up the chain. When you're buying a new IT system, do you get five clever guys down on Main Street to do it, or do you get Microsoft/IBM with all the promises of synergy in the cloud, the 15 page SLA (think of the bus count!) - and an invitation to that big "trade show" in Vegas? In practically all situations, even without corruption, the rational choice is to go with Microsoft. First, if it doesn't quite work, well, you have reams of case studies and white papers to point to, you really did do your homework, it must be us doing something wrong, let's get McKinsey to write a report. If it goes down, look at the fancy SLA. Plenty of cover that you don't have with the local guys - indeed, you'll learn just how many of your colleagues could have told you from the beginning that it would never have worked. And if it did work, all that nice money you saved disappears from your next budget to have the equivalent of Microsoft fix potholes in the next department. Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs. Again, all of this without specific incompetence or corruption, without being specifically pliable to any outside interest.