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I am not advocating for central planning. As I underscored in my comment, I advocate for something closer to the defense procurement model: where the market is

I am not advocating for central planning. As I underscored in my comment, I advocate for something closer to the defense procurement model: where the market is failing to provide an appropriate off the shelf product and the state contracts an entity (usually a private company, but in the case of software it could be a public agency) to make it for them. This is a model that is currently in use in the US, in the EU, and actually worked well in the USSR too, their Ladas (and consumer products in general) might have been terrible but their defense industry was great.

ethbr1 1y ago
The USSR defense industry also funded multiple OKBs that would compete with each other for projects. In the EU's case, multi-party competitive bidding, with the winner taking the prime slot and others being assigned modular chunks of the product, sounds attractive. Specifically, with the stipulation that results would be used as a criteria in future bids. tl;dr -- Use the pyramid league system (e.g. from football) with promotion and relegation to efficiently create industry competition. Fuck up too many projects, down the pyramid you go.
- thmsths 1y ago
  Sounds good to me. I am not too dogmatic about the exact implementation of who does the work and your system seems to align incentives properly while also avoiding the too many cooks in the pot/too much dilution of the money into small projects to have an impact issues. From past failures the 2 things I want to be addressed are: 1) Have a proper procurement agency with actual experts at the helm, they are the "customer", they hand over the bids, they measure success, they should of course listen to end users. 2) Shield the project from petty internal politics. While I understand that political interference is inevitable, especially if you get public funding. The top priority is to have a good alternative to existing software in these 3 categories I defined. Not yet another job program/kickback to politically well connected entities.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    The typical reason for poor procurement outcomes is the who-watches-the-watchers-ad-infinitum problem. At stake: huge amounts of money Naturally, people will go to great lengths to try and obtain that, by influencing the key decision makers. So you put in a layer above the decision makers. So they influence the layer above the decision makers. Repeat-repeat. The only true defense against corruption, at scale, is competition. Because then everyone tries to knife each other in the back, and it generally zero-sums.

ethbr1 1y ago

The USSR defense industry also funded multiple OKBs that would compete with each other for projects. In the EU's case, multi-party competitive bidding, with the winner taking the prime slot and others being assigned modular chunks of the product, sounds attractive. Specifically, with the stipulation that results would be used as a criteria in future bids. tl;dr -- Use the pyramid league system (e.g. from football) with promotion and relegation to efficiently create industry competition. Fuck up too many projects, down the pyramid you go.

thmsths 1y ago
Sounds good to me. I am not too dogmatic about the exact implementation of who does the work and your system seems to align incentives properly while also avoiding the too many cooks in the pot/too much dilution of the money into small projects to have an impact issues. From past failures the 2 things I want to be addressed are: 1) Have a proper procurement agency with actual experts at the helm, they are the "customer", they hand over the bids, they measure success, they should of course listen to end users. 2) Shield the project from petty internal politics. While I understand that political interference is inevitable, especially if you get public funding. The top priority is to have a good alternative to existing software in these 3 categories I defined. Not yet another job program/kickback to politically well connected entities.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  The typical reason for poor procurement outcomes is the who-watches-the-watchers-ad-infinitum problem. At stake: huge amounts of money Naturally, people will go to great lengths to try and obtain that, by influencing the key decision makers. So you put in a layer above the decision makers. So they influence the layer above the decision makers. Repeat-repeat. The only true defense against corruption, at scale, is competition. Because then everyone tries to knife each other in the back, and it generally zero-sums.