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Brookings seems to be advocating funding open source IT projects that already exist, for example a big ($10m+) check to the Apache Foundation. Apache already ha

Brookings seems to be advocating funding open source IT projects that already exist, for example a big ($10m+) check to the Apache Foundation. Apache already has the compliance competency. It may be more efficient to use existing grant writing for universities. The Apache Foundation can redistribute the money it can’t hire programmers competently the way a university research department can. However it would be bigger impact to write smaller checks for many tools. The real problem is that single purpose / single feature IT software tends to be the best at what it does but is the hardest to fund this way. The compromise will probably be funding people to write and evangelize standards. This is too bad, because people who apply for grants aren’t Google, they aren’t standardizing an existing, widely deployed real piece of successful engineering without any economics brakes. They’re people writing things like SOC 2 or ISO 27000xxx that arguably do not provide any meaningful value at all - standards that could vanish overnight and absolutely nothing about a single person’s daily life would change at all. 18F or whatever publishes a lot of stuff like this. Markdown policy documents. I think it’s profoundly wasteful, it is taking talented people’s intellectual energy and diverting it to something that not only hardly anyone will use, but perpetuates the worst aspects of government - the belief that text and bureaucracy and the way lawyers do things is intrinsically valuable, as opposed to something normal people routinely completely and utterly ignore.

sethish 6y ago
I'm not sure who I would trust, but I don't generally trust university research departments to produce high quality, reusable software. Not that industry projects produce consistent quality software either, but fewer of those projects are open sourced.
- peterwoerner 6y ago
  Sure, but there is no reward for research departments to produce high quality code. Their job is to experiment and publish, maintainable bug free(unless it effects their code) doesn't get rewarded. With that being said there are tons of high quality open source scientific computing projects e.g. lammps, abinit, dakota, Deal.II which are open source, ran by people at government research labs and universities and funded by e.g. NSF which work really nicely and are (I assume) quality software products. I will note that the Europeans seem to be better and producing these kinds of works than the Yankees.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    One wants to get something that is worthwhile, of course. It would be fairly easy to vet existing projects and codebases for their quality at a high level. Mostly at a binary level, with the goal to weed out total junk. Like a license, I think it would be nice if projects adopted a development guideline, code formatting, the commit, code review, merge process, etc. So that everyone can have a common set of known operating norms around how that project is developed. It would be a lot easier for a funding organization to review if that were in place. The Robert's Rules of Code Review. Bonus points if this were all encapsulated into an automatic process. I think there is a ton of value in funding projects (Apache,Rust,Blender,etc) as well as individuals. It would be wonderful if someone could go on sabbatical, full or part time and get paid to work on OSS. Maybe you apply for a grant, show them the git repos (process above analyzes), one has a plan (fix bugs, new features, evangelism, tPM, etc) for the time and with time with the bare minimum of goals. Like an agent can watch your activity log and do a roll-up. I think 50k a year would be a number that many technical folks making much much more would jump at the chance to just work on OSS.
  - acdha 6y ago
    > Sure, but there is no reward for research departments to produce high quality code. Their job is to experiment and publish, maintainable bug free(unless it effects their code) doesn't get rewarded. This isn't completely true. I'm familiar with at least few projects which got grants specifically to build tools for other scientists and those were great for funding general software engineering jobs not tied to the usual academic publication/job cycle. That was good for supporting ongoing upgrades — nobody gets a publication for upgrading a dependency, which is how you end up with someone keeping a Windows 95 box on life support for years because they were focused on science – and also for supporting things like good documentation since that's a serious time commitment. It'd be an idea to scale up things like that for identified high-impact projects, with the trick being finding someone capable of overseeing software engineering rather than the usual academic focus of existing grant panels. Seems like something which might be a fit under the Commerce department since there's a lot of stuff which American businesses benefit from but generally do not directly support.
    - 6y ago
- TimSchumann 6y ago
  While I agree with your, let's call them reservations, about the quality of said software written by scientists who are not professional software engineers -- I still believe it would be a net benefit to the world if Congress tied all federally funded research dollars to an open source license, up to and including disclosure on hardware specifications and firmware source code. I've got a friend on the data science/visibility team at CERN, and she has some fun stories. It's absurd to me that the reproducibility path for so much modern day research in nearly every field passes through proprietary closed source software, proprietary pre-compiled signed binaries, ditto for firmware, and then (sometimes) hardware where the entirety of the documentation consists of 'A service contract with the vendor'. The reproducibility crisis in the sciences right now is essentially an excess of inputs and deficit of testing those inputs -- closed source hardware/software is not helping.
- ska 6y ago
  There is plausibly an easy enough solution for this, if the grant structure allows/encourages departments hiring developers to help with this. If your primary source of labor for this is short term grad students with no expertise in software development, and not training mechanism, the results are predictable. Another thing that works against this is a lack of academic credit for doing,overseeing, or steering the work. This also could change. Changing the incentives can easily change the results.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > Another thing that works against this is a lack of academic credit for doing,overseeing, or steering the work. This also could change. > Changing the incentives can easily change the results. Arguably, besides the PI (Principal Investigator) listed on a paper, you should also list a Principal Engineer.
Ericson2314 6y ago
Look up https://nlnet.nl/ https://nlnet.nl/ they demux big EU grants to small projects that aren't well equipped to apply on their own. It has been solving the problem you mention very well.
pbronez 6y ago
> 18F or whatever publishes a lot of stuff like this. Markdown policy documents. I think it’s profoundly wasteful I think you’re under-estimating the value of publishing a good policy from a respectable source within the Federal government. Many of the government’s technology problems are actually self-inflicted policy problems. Publishing a good policy gives internal reformers a place to start. When the lawyers and security people start telling you no, it’s much more effective to say “actually this language comes directly from GSA, who approved it for X, which has the same compliance requirement you’re concerned about” than to simply protest that it’s industry best practice. I do agree that this lawyers-first way of doing things kinda sucks. It’s certainly not the way to maximize tech success. But it’s the system/culture we’ve got. I’d love to hear ideas for changing it, especially if you can figure out a way to accomplish the privacy, security, integrity, and fairness objectives that the current system prioritizes. A government agency struggling to serve the public good because it’s hobbled by obsolete tech is better than an agency enabled by cutting edge tech unshackled from the public interest and democratic legitimacy.
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  > But it’s the system/culture we’ve got. We wind up with a lot of political and business family dynasties despite the terrible incompetence of sons and daughters. Part of that is that families can operate totally without policies, that they are having horrible dynasty lawsuits because nothing is written on paper or litigated that way. Yet as long as they don’t sue each other, the lack of policy friction - a “liquidity” that may not show up as a dollar amount but as something else - makes the family dynasty surprisingly competitive. Wouldn’t it be ironic that policies - specifically the hundred+ page markdown output kind of policies, not something succinct like I don’t know, the Ten Commandments or the Bill of Rights - make the corrupt family dynasty more competitive?

sethish 6y ago

I'm not sure who I would trust, but I don't generally trust university research departments to produce high quality, reusable software. Not that industry projects produce consistent quality software either, but fewer of those projects are open sourced.

peterwoerner 6y ago
Sure, but there is no reward for research departments to produce high quality code. Their job is to experiment and publish, maintainable bug free(unless it effects their code) doesn't get rewarded. With that being said there are tons of high quality open source scientific computing projects e.g. lammps, abinit, dakota, Deal.II which are open source, ran by people at government research labs and universities and funded by e.g. NSF which work really nicely and are (I assume) quality software products. I will note that the Europeans seem to be better and producing these kinds of works than the Yankees.
- sitkack 6y ago
  One wants to get something that is worthwhile, of course. It would be fairly easy to vet existing projects and codebases for their quality at a high level. Mostly at a binary level, with the goal to weed out total junk. Like a license, I think it would be nice if projects adopted a development guideline, code formatting, the commit, code review, merge process, etc. So that everyone can have a common set of known operating norms around how that project is developed. It would be a lot easier for a funding organization to review if that were in place. The Robert's Rules of Code Review. Bonus points if this were all encapsulated into an automatic process. I think there is a ton of value in funding projects (Apache,Rust,Blender,etc) as well as individuals. It would be wonderful if someone could go on sabbatical, full or part time and get paid to work on OSS. Maybe you apply for a grant, show them the git repos (process above analyzes), one has a plan (fix bugs, new features, evangelism, tPM, etc) for the time and with time with the bare minimum of goals. Like an agent can watch your activity log and do a roll-up. I think 50k a year would be a number that many technical folks making much much more would jump at the chance to just work on OSS.
- acdha 6y ago
  > Sure, but there is no reward for research departments to produce high quality code. Their job is to experiment and publish, maintainable bug free(unless it effects their code) doesn't get rewarded. This isn't completely true. I'm familiar with at least few projects which got grants specifically to build tools for other scientists and those were great for funding general software engineering jobs not tied to the usual academic publication/job cycle. That was good for supporting ongoing upgrades — nobody gets a publication for upgrading a dependency, which is how you end up with someone keeping a Windows 95 box on life support for years because they were focused on science – and also for supporting things like good documentation since that's a serious time commitment. It'd be an idea to scale up things like that for identified high-impact projects, with the trick being finding someone capable of overseeing software engineering rather than the usual academic focus of existing grant panels. Seems like something which might be a fit under the Commerce department since there's a lot of stuff which American businesses benefit from but generally do not directly support.
  - 6y ago
TimSchumann 6y ago
While I agree with your, let's call them reservations, about the quality of said software written by scientists who are not professional software engineers -- I still believe it would be a net benefit to the world if Congress tied all federally funded research dollars to an open source license, up to and including disclosure on hardware specifications and firmware source code. I've got a friend on the data science/visibility team at CERN, and she has some fun stories. It's absurd to me that the reproducibility path for so much modern day research in nearly every field passes through proprietary closed source software, proprietary pre-compiled signed binaries, ditto for firmware, and then (sometimes) hardware where the entirety of the documentation consists of 'A service contract with the vendor'. The reproducibility crisis in the sciences right now is essentially an excess of inputs and deficit of testing those inputs -- closed source hardware/software is not helping.
ska 6y ago
There is plausibly an easy enough solution for this, if the grant structure allows/encourages departments hiring developers to help with this. If your primary source of labor for this is short term grad students with no expertise in software development, and not training mechanism, the results are predictable. Another thing that works against this is a lack of academic credit for doing,overseeing, or steering the work. This also could change. Changing the incentives can easily change the results.
- webmaven 6y ago
  > Another thing that works against this is a lack of academic credit for doing,overseeing, or steering the work. This also could change. > Changing the incentives can easily change the results. Arguably, besides the PI (Principal Investigator) listed on a paper, you should also list a Principal Engineer.

Ericson2314 6y ago

Look up https://nlnet.nl/ https://nlnet.nl/ they demux big EU grants to small projects that aren't well equipped to apply on their own. It has been solving the problem you mention very well.

pbronez 6y ago

> 18F or whatever publishes a lot of stuff like this. Markdown policy documents. I think it’s profoundly wasteful I think you’re under-estimating the value of publishing a good policy from a respectable source within the Federal government. Many of the government’s technology problems are actually self-inflicted policy problems. Publishing a good policy gives internal reformers a place to start. When the lawyers and security people start telling you no, it’s much more effective to say “actually this language comes directly from GSA, who approved it for X, which has the same compliance requirement you’re concerned about” than to simply protest that it’s industry best practice. I do agree that this lawyers-first way of doing things kinda sucks. It’s certainly not the way to maximize tech success. But it’s the system/culture we’ve got. I’d love to hear ideas for changing it, especially if you can figure out a way to accomplish the privacy, security, integrity, and fairness objectives that the current system prioritizes. A government agency struggling to serve the public good because it’s hobbled by obsolete tech is better than an agency enabled by cutting edge tech unshackled from the public interest and democratic legitimacy.

an_opabinia 6y ago
> But it’s the system/culture we’ve got. We wind up with a lot of political and business family dynasties despite the terrible incompetence of sons and daughters. Part of that is that families can operate totally without policies, that they are having horrible dynasty lawsuits because nothing is written on paper or litigated that way. Yet as long as they don’t sue each other, the lack of policy friction - a “liquidity” that may not show up as a dollar amount but as something else - makes the family dynasty surprisingly competitive. Wouldn’t it be ironic that policies - specifically the hundred+ page markdown output kind of policies, not something succinct like I don’t know, the Ten Commandments or the Bill of Rights - make the corrupt family dynasty more competitive?