8 ms·

In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

566 points by div3rs3 5y ago

trhway 5y ago
>The city's local government, spent 1 billion Swedish crowns (100 million dollars) over 7 years to build a massive do-everything school IT platform, which students, teachers and parents are forced to use. And their app is awful. Slow, buggy, almost unusable. One parent managed to access other people's private data, leading to @Stockholmsstad being fined for bad security. where is juicy details like who did it? Oracle? IBM? ..? > So a few parents decided, since the data is basically their data, to build their own better version. A couple of months later, @oppnaskolplatt was ready. Bad precedent that must be squished ruthlessly. Otherwise next time they would decide to have their own better roads, police, government... that slippery slop of "we the people".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- T-A 5y ago
  > where is juicy details like who did it? Oracle? IBM? ..? According to [1], no less than four contractors: Tieto, Ping Pong (apparently responsible for security), Unikum and Nova Software. [1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&u=https://www.breakit.se/artikel/21423/har-ar-it-bolaget-bakom-haveriet-pa-skolplattformen https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&u=https:/...
  - progre 5y ago
    Tieto, Nova Software and Unikum are well known players in the edu-it space with Tieto beeing the big one (they are in a lot of other industries as well). Normally they are in direct competition with each other.
    - tephra 5y ago
      The best quote pertaining to Tieto that I'll never forget is when they one the contract to build a new system dealing with something around people with cancer in Luleå. One person on IRC simply stated: "Well now I'm really glad that I don't have cancer _and_ lives in Luleå".
      - progre 5y ago
        I've worked quite a bit doing migrations and integrations against one of their products. The database schema is... interesting. This thing obviously started as a Sweden-only product, so the database schema for the Swedish version has Swedish column names (first mistake here). When they wanted to build a version for the larger Nordic market they decided to translate the column names to English (well, ok...). But since they already had a lot of customer installations using the Swedish version they have maintained 2 parallell database versions, essentially identical - except for all column names - for something like 20 years now. For this product they have also maintained a home grown version of Visual Basic for automation tasks within the system. Essentially VB6 except lots of bugs and quirks that are so old that if they fix them now, literally millions of man-hours will be required to migrate the existing automations that rely on those quirks.
- marvin 5y ago
  In Scandinavia, contracting agencies are king. We've brewed up many local varieties of these, that are much smaller, probably a bit more skilled and generally don't deliberately take money from customers that clearly don't know what they're doing. Directly employing most of one's required software engineers is largely a very new phenomenon, and not yet widespread. In Norway, you'd have e.g. Evry, Itera, Bouvet, Miles, Computas as well as international companies like Steria, Accenture and CapGemini. They contract out developers at ~$125 an hour and pay a regular middle-class salary. A large portion of software engineers are employed at a company like this.
brighton36 5y ago
Government procurement is fundamentally broken, in the software world. The incentives of procurement seems to ensure that the worst software is produced, at a significantly greater cost than free alternatives. I blame this on the rise of administrative costs in the universities (which trickle into enterprise) and the inherent disagreeableness (with outsiders) amongst the price's law coalition.
bsder 5y ago
While I love the David vs Goliath here, I'm going to point out the thing that open source folks just love to fluff over: Who is going to maintain that app over time? Maintenance sucks and is expensive. I'm going through this right now with a security system for a non-profit. The old system is open source and works--but it's 10 years dead. So, they'd like to add these couple features. Who is going to develop that? Who is going to pay for that? What happens 10 years from now? So, they can pay money for a commercial solution which is "Somebody Else's Problem(tm)" or they can go with a bespoke system that becomes their problem. Maintenance is a cost that open source never accounts for.
- detaro 5y ago
  Of course open source also needs maintenance, but maintenance isn't suddenly cheaper because you bought a big commercial solution. The difference is that for open-source, you are not reliant on the original provider to maintain it, but can pick from a large range of open-source dev shops and consultancies to help as long as the size of the system is tractable. (or if it's a big thing, hire your own people and bring in external support as needed)
  - bsder 5y ago
    For someone without expertise, there is no difference between paying money to a proprietary company and paying money to an open source developer. In fact, open source is almost always worse--the proprietary company can at least generally demonstrate that they can do what they say. And, for contracts like these, the end customer generally gets the source anyway. So, to the end customer, there really is no difference. And this is before we get into the whole "Whose budget holds the money for that maintenance over time?" political football. A lot of government contracting is about transferring uncertain future payments into certain present payments. And someone will try to kill that budget at some point. I love open source. But open source software almost always fails hard when the subject isn't relevant to software programming.
    - oscardssmith 5y ago
908B64B197 5y ago
> One parent managed to access other people's private data, leading to @Stockholmsstad being fined for bad security. ... And the fine, levied by bureaucrats paid with taxpayer's money was paid with... Taxpayer's money. “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” ― Ronald Reagan
- ta988 5y ago
  Some would say that government services are regulating themselves.
- bsder 5y ago
  So, how does your silly platitude explain the difference in vaccine rollout across the US vs the EU? Thankfully, we don't live in the soundbite-driven, Rand-ian libertarian society that fools like you think would be a utopia. People like you think you're important--in reality people who cite platitudes like this are easily fooled peons who would get ground down with the rest of us peons. At the end of the day, government exists to do things that individuals can't do for themselves.
  - cassepipe 5y ago
    Not really matching HN guidelines but I enjoyed your rant :D
  - whatthesmack 5y ago
    That doesn't negate the truth conveyed by the quote... government is often horribly inefficient and many people don't want the so-called "help" the government forces upon those people. I certainly know I could manage my retirement funds more efficiently than the government. I dislike all the "help" I see government doing when it often produces worse results than anarchy.
    - jordanbeiber 5y ago
      Big companies are often horribly inefficient. A decent democratic government at least over here in Scandinavia, try to make life on average as good as possible for the majority. Funny you should mention pensions... Govt probably knows many or even most regular people are completely uninterested in pensions and/or “the market”. Many could need help or even be forced to set away money they otherwise wouldn’t. This is where the Swedish govt put you money if you didn’t chose yourself: https://www.ap7.se/ https://www.ap7.se/ Did you fare better?
snicksnak 5y ago
The changes are pretty ridiculous [1], apparently the gobernment's devs kept deliberately renaming a specific header by adding and increasing a number at the end, from `xsrf-token` up to `xsrf-token11` [0], clearly only with the intend to break their rival free market app. [0] https://twitter.com/oppnaskolplatt/status/1375052301182906373 https://twitter.com/oppnaskolplatt/status/137505230118290637... [1] https://github.com/kolplattformen/embedded-api/commit/b611228ab4785f8de0c39dfdf1fea78522226c1c#diff-49d517a3c6653cb9108c98a12d14e99f9a88bb5bcbff83a07a9347ef75cfed7dR166 https://github.com/kolplattformen/embedded-api/commit/b61122...
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  It's hilarious that this is actually happening.
  - current123123 5y ago
    Hilarious and potentially illegal.
- yoelo 5y ago
  The devs don't work for the Stockholm region nor the government. They are contractors. Stockholm is notorious for terrible fragmented outsourcing programs
- mwidell 5y ago
  Maybe Öppna Skolplattformen should just change their code to identify the token by its contents, no matter the parameter name?
  - enedil 5y ago
    Good luck with that if it's a CSRF token.
    - osirisguitar 5y ago
      It's supposed to be :-D
johngalt 5y ago
It's amazing how often giant IT projects like these go off the rails. Exploding costs and garbage implementations. If you start the sentence with: "A 5+ year government IT project that cost over 100 million-" I already know how the story ends. How do we improve this common scenario? What are the root causes? The common themes are: 1. Lack of technical project competence at the decision maker level. 2. Scope creep. Where the one true system has to do everything. 3. A 'one-pass' approach where everything is expected to be delivered as a working system at the end of the project. Even fixing two of these gives us a solid shot at a successful project.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  4. The requirements are often flat out wrong. The Phoenix payroll system comes to mind, the Canadian government tried to shift the blame to IBM, but have their hands tied since IBM delivered exactly what was in the contract. It's just that what the government decided to put in the contract has little to do with how they really do payroll.
  - breakfastduck 5y ago
    Basically the story of most govt IT investments.
    - jordanbeiber 5y ago
      Have you worked at big companies outside tech? Their IT budgets are often ginormous with very little to show for it. Consulting havens. Slow, if at all, moving project organizations. It’s about size, budget models and competences. Time for another rant: Note that Sweden have implemented “new public management” NPM which basically pushes government agencies to govern like the ever oh so successful free market companies. This has had many really bad side effects since the 90s and it’s right up the neoliberal alley. In my book it’s just silly and something only professional politicians together with consultants can cook. But it’s a different story, really.
    - lostlogin 5y ago
lordnacho 5y ago
Perhaps the thing to do is to offer up the government project to an open source initiative. "We need a school comms platform. It needs to have messaging and scheduling. People need to be authenticated (duh)." Now ordinarily I'd say "WTF who would build that for free?" but by the looks of it someone has done substantial work for free already. Heck, you could probably get free work from the kids themselves. There's plenty of people in education who would want to do odd jobs on it. Now maybe pay up for a few senior devs and a PM, so that someone is at least responsible for it, with their income tied to it. But make it a small group, for the same reason. If there's suggestions, or something breaks, there's a place to report that. End of the day, it's a platform for the people by the people. Sounds like a great way to get a community to build its own infrastructure?
- core-questions 5y ago
  I love this idea, but it seems that in general bureaucracies are not agile or freethinking enough to be willing to risk doing something like this, even though in the long run it might be amazing. Imagine if an easy-to-administer system of this ilk was freely available and was picked up by school districts around the world; that would be an incredible pool of talent to work with. Especially if the product can be a little bit fun and whimsical, being not-for-profit, compared to working on something dry and corporate.
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    Yeah, it's not gonna happen at ant scale soon. Quite simply the bureaucracy is trained to buy things from big businesses. They're the last people to know anything about how technology works, and can't be convinced by anything other than the authority of brand names. I'd love it if we lived in a society where everyone could contribute to everything. You see a bug, you report it on the board, someone says "hey I don't have time but you can look at it, it's gonna be in myscript.py". You fix it, they check your fix, and we're all better off. Having an army of kids doing it would help everyone. I think working on a real thing instead of a contrived project is huge in the development of coders. And as you say, they can add their owm imprint. Society has got to renew itself somehow, and it's not by being corporate.
Sirikon 5y ago
In Spain this is called a normal day
hpkuarg 5y ago
I wonder how Swedes maintain their reputation of having a well-run, corruption-free public sector?
- AdrianB1 5y ago
  Who said they do?
- yoelo 5y ago
  Corruption and inefficiency of this kind is a relatively new phenomenon, stemming from a regime of letting private contractors run the whole show. A fun fact is that Stockholm has one of the most expensive buildings in the world: Nya Karolinska, which has cost (converted from Swedish currency) around 2 billion dollars. The reason behind this is that construction was run as a public-private partnership. Meaning you shove loads of cash into private hands while you get none of the benefit.
  - throw123123123 5y ago
    All money spent by government goes into private hands. There are no "public hands"
  - brtkdotse 5y ago
    The whole thing just reeked. Boston Consulting Group had junior consultants billing 200 hours a month but couldn’t produce documentation of what the actually did
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wmf 5y ago
  This doesn't sound like corruption to me and does any government have good IT? Maybe Estonia?
  - jamesblonde 5y ago
    Actually Swedish govt has really good IT. I use the actual app a lot with 3 kids in the school system here in Stockholm. It's not that bad, functional UI, but non-IT folks could easily have problems. Some stupid decisions - like a whole new app for reporting absences - where you get redirected there, but with SSO. I suspect the contractors here are the bad boys, but there should be somebody in Stockholmsstad who stops these ridiculous changes. Probably the project mgr in Stockholmsstad is not technically literate enough and is getting hoodwinked about this app being a security threat. I hope this publicity changes things.
wrnr 5y ago
This happens in every city in EU. Yesterday I was checking out the mandatory drone tracking solution of my city provided by a local supplier. Don't think it a network of radars connected to a surface-to-air-missile installation, no, a lame skin on google maps where you upload a flight plan based on a pdf you need to find for yourself on another website.
renewiltord 5y ago
Government organizations are terrified about open source initiatives. There's something strange about it. You could volunteer to do all the work and they'll still oppose you at every turn. My hope is that we'll reach a stage where citizen participatory programming is normal for all. Where my dad could offer a PR to fix a typo on a government page casually as he browses it. I have a feeling we're not far off but you need it to happen in a place with low entrenched interests but with sufficient enlightenment. I think big US cities have the latter but not the former, and authoritarian developing nations lack both the former and the latter. So maybe smaller Western nations like Estonia. Or, my biggest hope, sufficiently advanced townships in America.
- progre 5y ago
  I don't know, when our libraries procured new state wide library software (each city had it's own before) they went with Koha (open source). This means that they are not really paying for development, only installation integrations and support. This opened up the bidding to much smaller players and was much cheaper over all.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Where was that? I am thrilled to hear it and eager to learn what factors made that possible.
    - progre 5y ago
      This was for the libraries in the "between the lakes" region in Sweden (it was not for the "state"-level, I missremebered). Here is a link (swedish) https://kohasverige.se/nyheter https://kohasverige.se/nyheter
      - renewiltord 5y ago
        Thank you!
- callesgg 5y ago
eCa 5y ago
IIUC, the open source app uses an unofficial/private api to communicate with the city’s application backend? Regardless of anything leading to the open source app being built, I struggle to take their side here. Looking at the code, it appears that they authenticate against the api? So it’s a third-party app using an api, against the first-party’s expressed wishes, to read and/or manipulate student data?[1] Of course the city will defend against that. [1] Correct me if I’m wrong here.
- dvdhnt 5y ago
  I feel like this is no different than using multiple web browsers to access my own generated content. The app uses your device, your electricity, and your credentials. The API is built using your tax money. I don’t see a problem.
- lolinder 5y ago
  I understand the same, but remember that this is a city government that built this app, not a private company. The app belongs, by rights, to the taxpayers who funded it, and for the city (or their contractors) to be actively working to prevent them from building a better version of it is clearly wrong. Publicly-funded applications should be required to be open source (barring national security concerns), but at the very least they shouldn't actively prevent open alternatives.
- reader_mode 5y ago
  >Of course the city will defend against that. Why would that be a given. I can understand it in scenarios where it messes up a monetisation strategy - but this bein publicly funded it's the opposite of what I'd expect.
- utrechtsouth 5y ago
  It looks like users use a different frontend than the one provided by the government. So it's users changing their own data. So that leaves a defense against... their own users? Makes no sense. Plus the tax payers funded the platform so it's not like the government has any legitimate interest in protecting the product itself like a private business might.
GauntletWizard 5y ago
if only there were some name for being dependent on a group that has shown you only abuse...
rbjorklin 5y ago
I don’t understand how it is allowed to use tax money for closed source projects in the first place.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  It shouldn't be. The US has the right idea with public domain, but that concept doesn't really exist anywhere else in the world and, for some reason, doesn't really exist for software at all.
  - ric2b 5y ago
    > The US has the right idea with public domain, but that concept doesn't really exist anywhere else in the world It does in my country, Portugal, at least: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom%C3%ADnio_p%C3%BAblico https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom%C3%ADnio_p%C3%BAblico And it sounds like it comes from some "Berne convention" in which a lot of other countries also participated.
cromka 5y ago
"The city's local government, @Stockholmsstad, spent 1 billion Swedish crowns (100 million dollars)" "@Stockholmsstad are now acting like angry toddlers." I'd read between the lines. I don't think it's a hurt ego, not with these numbers. Someone is (continued) to be paid for this to be happening. This reeks corruption.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  Well, angry toddlers are also often angry when someone takes something they believe to be theirs. And toddlers often think the whole world is theirs and theirs alone and everyone is here for their amusement .. and if reality tells them different, they can get very mean, too. So - I think the analogue holds somewhat.
  - danjac 5y ago
    It's not so much angry toddlers, who at least can be placated with ice cream and a Pixar movie. It's more government officials and contractors with their reputation and money on the line. In the case of government officials, it's not necessarily unmarked-bills-in-a-paper-bag-under-the-table kind of corruption, but the more pernicious "revolving door" of government/private industry kind.
- nix23 5y ago
  >This reeks corruption. Absolutely correct, it's smells exactly like the kill-LiMux "Project" from Munich. But Sweden has a pretty big history being corrupt, just think about Assange, Olof Palme...and the bad russian sub story.
  - ptr 5y ago
    OK, I'll bite. I'm thinking about those, but I don't see the corruption. Care to elaborate?
    - nix23 5y ago
      Sweden, LiMux or Olaf?
xrd 5y ago
If open source advocates banded together and "sold" this story to local governments, there would never be these kinds of boondoggles. I'm reminded of the same thing that happened in Oregon. Oracle came in with a low ball price, then extracted hundreds of millions of dollars out of the state for a POS health care system. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html
- duxup 5y ago
  Is open source really a place you would find what I imagine is an enterprise 'do everything' education related IT application? I like the idea but that's not a product I think open source folks ventures to build much?
  - jck 5y ago
    I do not understand the nature of this "do everything education app", but there are excellent open source LMS apps like https://moodle.org/ https://moodle.org/
    - mrmanner 5y ago
      This is more of an admin/communication thing. Absence, grades, class schedules, lunch menus, homework...
  - airhead969 5y ago
    There are many "do everything" mega solutions like SAP. They're usually terrible because they try to do too much, require changing processes to fit the software, aren't specialized enough in each area for real-world use, or aren't customizable enough. They're often terrible pieces thrown together too quickly under a utopian belief that one app will rule them all and users will just adapt to unusable garbage. There's nothing preventing a group from making a FOSS replacement of a government project made commercially, even if its goals aren't ideal.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
duxup 5y ago
They paid to develop an entirely original school app to "do everything"? Jebus....
askvictor 5y ago
The government's system sounds just like the "Ultranet" (as it was comically named) in Victoria, Australia a few years back which similarly aimed to be the one system to rule them all in government schools. Eventually went to the scrapheap (along with a few bureaucrats who were charged for corruption). During the tender process a few of us were toying with putting in a tender using Moodle, but glad we didn't waste our time as it was stitched up from the start.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  Ctrl-F'd for that exact phrase. I remember that system being introduced - I was in high school at the time and my mum was a teacher. It was down for the entirety of the single government-mandated training day, and when it finally came up everyone could tell from a mile off that it was a steaming pile of shit. I don't think we ever used it after the initial session, ever.
a3n 5y ago
> You can understand why they arent keen to allow it to continue as its using BankID to authenticate. Would you install a 3rd party app to access your bank account? Isn't that how Mint works? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit_Mint https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit_Mint
- aronatom 5y ago
  This 3rd party app in question ( mobilt bankid) is also used to access everything in Sweden ( taxes, banks, social security applications .. )
  - OskarS 5y ago
    Also: as a Swede, I must say, it works very well. It is also a closed source thing, but unlike this Stockholm Stad system, it’s basically a success story from the end user perspective. It’s great to have a unified, secure and easy to use way to access your bank and government services.
    - throwaway473825 5y ago
      As a fellow Swede, I must say that BankID is one of the most blantant corruption schemes that have happened in this country. It's a proprietary product that's not publicly available, and yet it's required for many governmental services. Obviously, it's a recipe for disaster. For example, when Swedbank found out that I use some service at another company, they closed my access to BankID and told me that I either move that engagement to them or ask the other company (which isn't part of the BankID oligopoly) to somehow get BankID. Even worse, there are some stories about people losing access to BankID for political opinions. That's China level of repression.
- hugolundin 5y ago
  Additionally, that tweet is wrong. BankID is an authentication system, and won’t give the 3rd party access to your bank account
  - 5y ago
tu7001 5y ago
Why such app at all, and how can gov may force people to use it?
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  Mandatory education system?
lenkite 5y ago
This is clearly malicious, definitely illegal and should be brought to a court of law. Frankly, I see jail time for the contractors doing this.
- pjc50 5y ago
  An expert on Swedish law? Got a cite for what they might be breaking?
  - lenkite 5y ago
    Nearly all nations have laws against misuse of taxpayer money. I believe a case can clearly be made for embezzlement and breach of public trust under Chapters 9 and 10 of the Swedish Penal Code.
flerp 5y ago
Fantastic! Looks amazing as well
say_it_as_it_is 5y ago
U.S. Government sweetheart deals with IBM aren't much better.
lampe3 5y ago
Germans: what? you guys have an app? Believe me its way worse here in Germany. I would consider this a luxury problem...
- Lionga 5y ago
  What? You guys build airports withouth 14 years of delay and 500% of the planned cost? German government is the european leader in corruption , even covid was used by many of them to get kickbacks for masks for elders and wasted 2 Billion € there. And like the corrupt "Flintenuschi" Ursula von der Leyen they get promoted to President of the European Commission for that if they manage to delete all evidence from their phone after beeing caught.
  - lampe3 5y ago
    Not only airports :D - Stuttgart 21 - elbphilharmonie, Hamburg - Mobile Internet - Everything that has to do with the Deutsche Bahn :D - more stuff...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
drno123 5y ago
It is fascinating how those expensive IT companies that get enormous government contracts, with huge profit margins, always hire shitty programmers.
- Lionga 5y ago
  I dont think the programmers are the problem. The problem are companies getting government contracts are good at exactly that getting government contracts. That mostly involves doing bribes without them beeing official corruption. They are horseshit at anything after that
- indymike 5y ago
  Behold the power of cost plus contracts.
- thrower123 5y ago
  Typically the way this works is that the A-listers are trotted out for the initial dog-and-pony show and prototype, then they move on to the next boondoggle and are backfilled by a rotating cast of Elbonians billing the same rate to flesh out the details. And that's where things go sideways.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ToFab123 5y ago
Reminds me the old "war" between AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger. I think I recall that one the same day there was around 50 updates to those programs. Each update breaking something from the other and then one blinked and the stream of updates stopped and the 2 apps no longer spoke to each other. https://www.istartedsomething.com/20140420/msn-messenger-and-aim-instant-messenger-war-reverse-engineering-and-sabotage/ https://www.istartedsomething.com/20140420/msn-messenger-and...
gopaz 5y ago
Not really sure what this platform contains, a backend, a site and an app? It sounds like if I would get 1% of the price to build this, I would laugh all the way to the bank.
johndoe42377 5y ago
Sweden is famous for its bone-headed bureaucracy and living by strict rules. Government in Sweden just cannot be wrong, be it immigration policies, gender policies or anything they do. If you disagree with them you are not progressive enough. One more thing. While government is migrant-welcoming (at least on paper) the population is extremely nationalist, not like in Japan, but not too far from it. Otherwise it is a very nice country.
waspight 5y ago
Is there a possibility to use OTA updates with expo since you are already using react native? To quicker get the header fixes out?
tibu 5y ago
Exactly the same is happening in Hungary. There was a huge educational system developed for schools from extremely huge budget but both the backend and front-end is crap. There was an alternative front-end built similar to the Swedish way but they were forced to shut it down.

566 points by div3rs3 5y ago

>The city's local government, spent 1 billion Swedish crowns (100 million dollars) over 7 years to build a massive do-everything school IT platform, which students, teachers and parents are forced to use. And their app is awful. Slow, buggy, almost unusable. One parent managed to access other people's private data, leading to @Stockholmsstad being fined for bad security. where is juicy details like who did it? Oracle? IBM? ..? > So a few parents decided, since the data is basically their data, to build their own better version. A couple of months later, @oppnaskolplatt was ready. Bad precedent that must be squished ruthlessly. Otherwise next time they would decide to have their own better roads, police, government... that slippery slop of "we the people".

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
T-A 5y ago
> where is juicy details like who did it? Oracle? IBM? ..? According to [1], no less than four contractors: Tieto, Ping Pong (apparently responsible for security), Unikum and Nova Software. [1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&u=https://www.breakit.se/artikel/21423/har-ar-it-bolaget-bakom-haveriet-pa-skolplattformen https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&u=https:/...
- progre 5y ago
  Tieto, Nova Software and Unikum are well known players in the edu-it space with Tieto beeing the big one (they are in a lot of other industries as well). Normally they are in direct competition with each other.
  - tephra 5y ago
    The best quote pertaining to Tieto that I'll never forget is when they one the contract to build a new system dealing with something around people with cancer in Luleå. One person on IRC simply stated: "Well now I'm really glad that I don't have cancer _and_ lives in Luleå".
    - progre 5y ago
      I've worked quite a bit doing migrations and integrations against one of their products. The database schema is... interesting. This thing obviously started as a Sweden-only product, so the database schema for the Swedish version has Swedish column names (first mistake here). When they wanted to build a version for the larger Nordic market they decided to translate the column names to English (well, ok...). But since they already had a lot of customer installations using the Swedish version they have maintained 2 parallell database versions, essentially identical - except for all column names - for something like 20 years now. For this product they have also maintained a home grown version of Visual Basic for automation tasks within the system. Essentially VB6 except lots of bugs and quirks that are so old that if they fix them now, literally millions of man-hours will be required to migrate the existing automations that rely on those quirks.
marvin 5y ago
In Scandinavia, contracting agencies are king. We've brewed up many local varieties of these, that are much smaller, probably a bit more skilled and generally don't deliberately take money from customers that clearly don't know what they're doing. Directly employing most of one's required software engineers is largely a very new phenomenon, and not yet widespread. In Norway, you'd have e.g. Evry, Itera, Bouvet, Miles, Computas as well as international companies like Steria, Accenture and CapGemini. They contract out developers at ~$125 an hour and pay a regular middle-class salary. A large portion of software engineers are employed at a company like this.

brighton36 5y ago

Government procurement is fundamentally broken, in the software world. The incentives of procurement seems to ensure that the worst software is produced, at a significantly greater cost than free alternatives. I blame this on the rise of administrative costs in the universities (which trickle into enterprise) and the inherent disagreeableness (with outsiders) amongst the price's law coalition.

bsder 5y ago

While I love the David vs Goliath here, I'm going to point out the thing that open source folks just love to fluff over: Who is going to maintain that app over time? Maintenance sucks and is expensive. I'm going through this right now with a security system for a non-profit. The old system is open source and works--but it's 10 years dead. So, they'd like to add these couple features. Who is going to develop that? Who is going to pay for that? What happens 10 years from now? So, they can pay money for a commercial solution which is "Somebody Else's Problem(tm)" or they can go with a bespoke system that becomes their problem. Maintenance is a cost that open source never accounts for.

detaro 5y ago
Of course open source also needs maintenance, but maintenance isn't suddenly cheaper because you bought a big commercial solution. The difference is that for open-source, you are not reliant on the original provider to maintain it, but can pick from a large range of open-source dev shops and consultancies to help as long as the size of the system is tractable. (or if it's a big thing, hire your own people and bring in external support as needed)
- bsder 5y ago
  For someone without expertise, there is no difference between paying money to a proprietary company and paying money to an open source developer. In fact, open source is almost always worse--the proprietary company can at least generally demonstrate that they can do what they say. And, for contracts like these, the end customer generally gets the source anyway. So, to the end customer, there really is no difference. And this is before we get into the whole "Whose budget holds the money for that maintenance over time?" political football. A lot of government contracting is about transferring uncertain future payments into certain present payments. And someone will try to kill that budget at some point. I love open source. But open source software almost always fails hard when the subject isn't relevant to software programming.
  - oscardssmith 5y ago

908B64B197 5y ago

> One parent managed to access other people's private data, leading to @Stockholmsstad being fined for bad security. ... And the fine, levied by bureaucrats paid with taxpayer's money was paid with... Taxpayer's money. “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” ― Ronald Reagan

ta988 5y ago
Some would say that government services are regulating themselves.
bsder 5y ago
So, how does your silly platitude explain the difference in vaccine rollout across the US vs the EU? Thankfully, we don't live in the soundbite-driven, Rand-ian libertarian society that fools like you think would be a utopia. People like you think you're important--in reality people who cite platitudes like this are easily fooled peons who would get ground down with the rest of us peons. At the end of the day, government exists to do things that individuals can't do for themselves.
- cassepipe 5y ago
  Not really matching HN guidelines but I enjoyed your rant :D
- whatthesmack 5y ago
  That doesn't negate the truth conveyed by the quote... government is often horribly inefficient and many people don't want the so-called "help" the government forces upon those people. I certainly know I could manage my retirement funds more efficiently than the government. I dislike all the "help" I see government doing when it often produces worse results than anarchy.
  - jordanbeiber 5y ago
    Big companies are often horribly inefficient. A decent democratic government at least over here in Scandinavia, try to make life on average as good as possible for the majority. Funny you should mention pensions... Govt probably knows many or even most regular people are completely uninterested in pensions and/or “the market”. Many could need help or even be forced to set away money they otherwise wouldn’t. This is where the Swedish govt put you money if you didn’t chose yourself: https://www.ap7.se/ https://www.ap7.se/ Did you fare better?

snicksnak 5y ago

The changes are pretty ridiculous [1], apparently the gobernment's devs kept deliberately renaming a specific header by adding and increasing a number at the end, from `xsrf-token` up to `xsrf-token11` [0], clearly only with the intend to break their rival free market app. [0] https://twitter.com/oppnaskolplatt/status/1375052301182906373 https://twitter.com/oppnaskolplatt/status/137505230118290637... [1] https://github.com/kolplattformen/embedded-api/commit/b611228ab4785f8de0c39dfdf1fea78522226c1c#diff-49d517a3c6653cb9108c98a12d14e99f9a88bb5bcbff83a07a9347ef75cfed7dR166 https://github.com/kolplattformen/embedded-api/commit/b61122...

ZephyrBlu 5y ago
It's hilarious that this is actually happening.
- current123123 5y ago
  Hilarious and potentially illegal.
yoelo 5y ago
The devs don't work for the Stockholm region nor the government. They are contractors. Stockholm is notorious for terrible fragmented outsourcing programs
mwidell 5y ago
Maybe Öppna Skolplattformen should just change their code to identify the token by its contents, no matter the parameter name?
- enedil 5y ago
  Good luck with that if it's a CSRF token.
  - osirisguitar 5y ago
    It's supposed to be :-D

johngalt 5y ago

It's amazing how often giant IT projects like these go off the rails. Exploding costs and garbage implementations. If you start the sentence with: "A 5+ year government IT project that cost over 100 million-" I already know how the story ends. How do we improve this common scenario? What are the root causes? The common themes are: 1. Lack of technical project competence at the decision maker level. 2. Scope creep. Where the one true system has to do everything. 3. A 'one-pass' approach where everything is expected to be delivered as a working system at the end of the project. Even fixing two of these gives us a solid shot at a successful project.

908B64B197 5y ago
4. The requirements are often flat out wrong. The Phoenix payroll system comes to mind, the Canadian government tried to shift the blame to IBM, but have their hands tied since IBM delivered exactly what was in the contract. It's just that what the government decided to put in the contract has little to do with how they really do payroll.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  Basically the story of most govt IT investments.
  - jordanbeiber 5y ago
    Have you worked at big companies outside tech? Their IT budgets are often ginormous with very little to show for it. Consulting havens. Slow, if at all, moving project organizations. It’s about size, budget models and competences. Time for another rant: Note that Sweden have implemented “new public management” NPM which basically pushes government agencies to govern like the ever oh so successful free market companies. This has had many really bad side effects since the 90s and it’s right up the neoliberal alley. In my book it’s just silly and something only professional politicians together with consultants can cook. But it’s a different story, really.
  - lostlogin 5y ago

lordnacho 5y ago

Perhaps the thing to do is to offer up the government project to an open source initiative. "We need a school comms platform. It needs to have messaging and scheduling. People need to be authenticated (duh)." Now ordinarily I'd say "WTF who would build that for free?" but by the looks of it someone has done substantial work for free already. Heck, you could probably get free work from the kids themselves. There's plenty of people in education who would want to do odd jobs on it. Now maybe pay up for a few senior devs and a PM, so that someone is at least responsible for it, with their income tied to it. But make it a small group, for the same reason. If there's suggestions, or something breaks, there's a place to report that. End of the day, it's a platform for the people by the people. Sounds like a great way to get a community to build its own infrastructure?

core-questions 5y ago
I love this idea, but it seems that in general bureaucracies are not agile or freethinking enough to be willing to risk doing something like this, even though in the long run it might be amazing. Imagine if an easy-to-administer system of this ilk was freely available and was picked up by school districts around the world; that would be an incredible pool of talent to work with. Especially if the product can be a little bit fun and whimsical, being not-for-profit, compared to working on something dry and corporate.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  Yeah, it's not gonna happen at ant scale soon. Quite simply the bureaucracy is trained to buy things from big businesses. They're the last people to know anything about how technology works, and can't be convinced by anything other than the authority of brand names. I'd love it if we lived in a society where everyone could contribute to everything. You see a bug, you report it on the board, someone says "hey I don't have time but you can look at it, it's gonna be in myscript.py". You fix it, they check your fix, and we're all better off. Having an army of kids doing it would help everyone. I think working on a real thing instead of a contrived project is huge in the development of coders. And as you say, they can add their owm imprint. Society has got to renew itself somehow, and it's not by being corporate.

Sirikon 5y ago

In Spain this is called a normal day

hpkuarg 5y ago

I wonder how Swedes maintain their reputation of having a well-run, corruption-free public sector?

AdrianB1 5y ago
Who said they do?
yoelo 5y ago
Corruption and inefficiency of this kind is a relatively new phenomenon, stemming from a regime of letting private contractors run the whole show. A fun fact is that Stockholm has one of the most expensive buildings in the world: Nya Karolinska, which has cost (converted from Swedish currency) around 2 billion dollars. The reason behind this is that construction was run as a public-private partnership. Meaning you shove loads of cash into private hands while you get none of the benefit.
- throw123123123 5y ago
  All money spent by government goes into private hands. There are no "public hands"
- brtkdotse 5y ago
  The whole thing just reeked. Boston Consulting Group had junior consultants billing 200 hours a month but couldn’t produce documentation of what the actually did
deleted 5y ago
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wmf 5y ago
This doesn't sound like corruption to me and does any government have good IT? Maybe Estonia?
- jamesblonde 5y ago
  Actually Swedish govt has really good IT. I use the actual app a lot with 3 kids in the school system here in Stockholm. It's not that bad, functional UI, but non-IT folks could easily have problems. Some stupid decisions - like a whole new app for reporting absences - where you get redirected there, but with SSO. I suspect the contractors here are the bad boys, but there should be somebody in Stockholmsstad who stops these ridiculous changes. Probably the project mgr in Stockholmsstad is not technically literate enough and is getting hoodwinked about this app being a security threat. I hope this publicity changes things.

wrnr 5y ago

This happens in every city in EU. Yesterday I was checking out the mandatory drone tracking solution of my city provided by a local supplier. Don't think it a network of radars connected to a surface-to-air-missile installation, no, a lame skin on google maps where you upload a flight plan based on a pdf you need to find for yourself on another website.

renewiltord 5y ago

Government organizations are terrified about open source initiatives. There's something strange about it. You could volunteer to do all the work and they'll still oppose you at every turn. My hope is that we'll reach a stage where citizen participatory programming is normal for all. Where my dad could offer a PR to fix a typo on a government page casually as he browses it. I have a feeling we're not far off but you need it to happen in a place with low entrenched interests but with sufficient enlightenment. I think big US cities have the latter but not the former, and authoritarian developing nations lack both the former and the latter. So maybe smaller Western nations like Estonia. Or, my biggest hope, sufficiently advanced townships in America.

progre 5y ago
I don't know, when our libraries procured new state wide library software (each city had it's own before) they went with Koha (open source). This means that they are not really paying for development, only installation integrations and support. This opened up the bidding to much smaller players and was much cheaper over all.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Where was that? I am thrilled to hear it and eager to learn what factors made that possible.
  - progre 5y ago
    This was for the libraries in the "between the lakes" region in Sweden (it was not for the "state"-level, I missremebered). Here is a link (swedish) https://kohasverige.se/nyheter https://kohasverige.se/nyheter
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      Thank you!
callesgg 5y ago

eCa 5y ago

IIUC, the open source app uses an unofficial/private api to communicate with the city’s application backend? Regardless of anything leading to the open source app being built, I struggle to take their side here. Looking at the code, it appears that they authenticate against the api? So it’s a third-party app using an api, against the first-party’s expressed wishes, to read and/or manipulate student data?[1] Of course the city will defend against that. [1] Correct me if I’m wrong here.

dvdhnt 5y ago
I feel like this is no different than using multiple web browsers to access my own generated content. The app uses your device, your electricity, and your credentials. The API is built using your tax money. I don’t see a problem.
lolinder 5y ago
I understand the same, but remember that this is a city government that built this app, not a private company. The app belongs, by rights, to the taxpayers who funded it, and for the city (or their contractors) to be actively working to prevent them from building a better version of it is clearly wrong. Publicly-funded applications should be required to be open source (barring national security concerns), but at the very least they shouldn't actively prevent open alternatives.
reader_mode 5y ago
>Of course the city will defend against that. Why would that be a given. I can understand it in scenarios where it messes up a monetisation strategy - but this bein publicly funded it's the opposite of what I'd expect.
utrechtsouth 5y ago
It looks like users use a different frontend than the one provided by the government. So it's users changing their own data. So that leaves a defense against... their own users? Makes no sense. Plus the tax payers funded the platform so it's not like the government has any legitimate interest in protecting the product itself like a private business might.

GauntletWizard 5y ago

if only there were some name for being dependent on a group that has shown you only abuse...

rbjorklin 5y ago

I don’t understand how it is allowed to use tax money for closed source projects in the first place.

globular-toast 5y ago
It shouldn't be. The US has the right idea with public domain, but that concept doesn't really exist anywhere else in the world and, for some reason, doesn't really exist for software at all.
- ric2b 5y ago
  > The US has the right idea with public domain, but that concept doesn't really exist anywhere else in the world It does in my country, Portugal, at least: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom%C3%ADnio_p%C3%BAblico https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom%C3%ADnio_p%C3%BAblico And it sounds like it comes from some "Berne convention" in which a lot of other countries also participated.

cromka 5y ago

"The city's local government, @Stockholmsstad, spent 1 billion Swedish crowns (100 million dollars)" "@Stockholmsstad are now acting like angry toddlers." I'd read between the lines. I don't think it's a hurt ego, not with these numbers. Someone is (continued) to be paid for this to be happening. This reeks corruption.

hutzlibu 5y ago
Well, angry toddlers are also often angry when someone takes something they believe to be theirs. And toddlers often think the whole world is theirs and theirs alone and everyone is here for their amusement .. and if reality tells them different, they can get very mean, too. So - I think the analogue holds somewhat.
- danjac 5y ago
  It's not so much angry toddlers, who at least can be placated with ice cream and a Pixar movie. It's more government officials and contractors with their reputation and money on the line. In the case of government officials, it's not necessarily unmarked-bills-in-a-paper-bag-under-the-table kind of corruption, but the more pernicious "revolving door" of government/private industry kind.
nix23 5y ago
>This reeks corruption. Absolutely correct, it's smells exactly like the kill-LiMux "Project" from Munich. But Sweden has a pretty big history being corrupt, just think about Assange, Olof Palme...and the bad russian sub story.
- ptr 5y ago
  OK, I'll bite. I'm thinking about those, but I don't see the corruption. Care to elaborate?
  - nix23 5y ago
    Sweden, LiMux or Olaf?

xrd 5y ago

If open source advocates banded together and "sold" this story to local governments, there would never be these kinds of boondoggles. I'm reminded of the same thing that happened in Oregon. Oracle came in with a low ball price, then extracted hundreds of millions of dollars out of the state for a POS health care system. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html

duxup 5y ago
Is open source really a place you would find what I imagine is an enterprise 'do everything' education related IT application? I like the idea but that's not a product I think open source folks ventures to build much?
- jck 5y ago
  I do not understand the nature of this "do everything education app", but there are excellent open source LMS apps like https://moodle.org/ https://moodle.org/
  - mrmanner 5y ago
    This is more of an admin/communication thing. Absence, grades, class schedules, lunch menus, homework...
- airhead969 5y ago
  There are many "do everything" mega solutions like SAP. They're usually terrible because they try to do too much, require changing processes to fit the software, aren't specialized enough in each area for real-world use, or aren't customizable enough. They're often terrible pieces thrown together too quickly under a utopian belief that one app will rule them all and users will just adapt to unusable garbage. There's nothing preventing a group from making a FOSS replacement of a government project made commercially, even if its goals aren't ideal.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago

duxup 5y ago

They paid to develop an entirely original school app to "do everything"? Jebus....

askvictor 5y ago

The government's system sounds just like the "Ultranet" (as it was comically named) in Victoria, Australia a few years back which similarly aimed to be the one system to rule them all in government schools. Eventually went to the scrapheap (along with a few bureaucrats who were charged for corruption). During the tender process a few of us were toying with putting in a tender using Moodle, but glad we didn't waste our time as it was stitched up from the start.

AussieWog93 5y ago
Ctrl-F'd for that exact phrase. I remember that system being introduced - I was in high school at the time and my mum was a teacher. It was down for the entirety of the single government-mandated training day, and when it finally came up everyone could tell from a mile off that it was a steaming pile of shit. I don't think we ever used it after the initial session, ever.

a3n 5y ago

> You can understand why they arent keen to allow it to continue as its using BankID to authenticate. Would you install a 3rd party app to access your bank account? Isn't that how Mint works? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit_Mint https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuit_Mint

aronatom 5y ago
This 3rd party app in question ( mobilt bankid) is also used to access everything in Sweden ( taxes, banks, social security applications .. )
- OskarS 5y ago
  Also: as a Swede, I must say, it works very well. It is also a closed source thing, but unlike this Stockholm Stad system, it’s basically a success story from the end user perspective. It’s great to have a unified, secure and easy to use way to access your bank and government services.
  - throwaway473825 5y ago
    As a fellow Swede, I must say that BankID is one of the most blantant corruption schemes that have happened in this country. It's a proprietary product that's not publicly available, and yet it's required for many governmental services. Obviously, it's a recipe for disaster. For example, when Swedbank found out that I use some service at another company, they closed my access to BankID and told me that I either move that engagement to them or ask the other company (which isn't part of the BankID oligopoly) to somehow get BankID. Even worse, there are some stories about people losing access to BankID for political opinions. That's China level of repression.
hugolundin 5y ago
Additionally, that tweet is wrong. BankID is an authentication system, and won’t give the 3rd party access to your bank account
- 5y ago

tu7001 5y ago

Why such app at all, and how can gov may force people to use it?

hutzlibu 5y ago
Mandatory education system?

lenkite 5y ago

This is clearly malicious, definitely illegal and should be brought to a court of law. Frankly, I see jail time for the contractors doing this.

pjc50 5y ago
An expert on Swedish law? Got a cite for what they might be breaking?
- lenkite 5y ago
  Nearly all nations have laws against misuse of taxpayer money. I believe a case can clearly be made for embezzlement and breach of public trust under Chapters 9 and 10 of the Swedish Penal Code.

flerp 5y ago

Fantastic! Looks amazing as well

say_it_as_it_is 5y ago

U.S. Government sweetheart deals with IBM aren't much better.

lampe3 5y ago

Germans: what? you guys have an app? Believe me its way worse here in Germany. I would consider this a luxury problem...

Lionga 5y ago
What? You guys build airports withouth 14 years of delay and 500% of the planned cost? German government is the european leader in corruption , even covid was used by many of them to get kickbacks for masks for elders and wasted 2 Billion € there. And like the corrupt "Flintenuschi" Ursula von der Leyen they get promoted to President of the European Commission for that if they manage to delete all evidence from their phone after beeing caught.
- lampe3 5y ago
  Not only airports :D - Stuttgart 21 - elbphilharmonie, Hamburg - Mobile Internet - Everything that has to do with the Deutsche Bahn :D - more stuff...
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drno123 5y ago

It is fascinating how those expensive IT companies that get enormous government contracts, with huge profit margins, always hire shitty programmers.

Lionga 5y ago
I dont think the programmers are the problem. The problem are companies getting government contracts are good at exactly that getting government contracts. That mostly involves doing bribes without them beeing official corruption. They are horseshit at anything after that
indymike 5y ago
Behold the power of cost plus contracts.
thrower123 5y ago
Typically the way this works is that the A-listers are trotted out for the initial dog-and-pony show and prototype, then they move on to the next boondoggle and are backfilled by a rotating cast of Elbonians billing the same rate to flesh out the details. And that's where things go sideways.
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ToFab123 5y ago

Reminds me the old "war" between AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger. I think I recall that one the same day there was around 50 updates to those programs. Each update breaking something from the other and then one blinked and the stream of updates stopped and the 2 apps no longer spoke to each other. https://www.istartedsomething.com/20140420/msn-messenger-and-aim-instant-messenger-war-reverse-engineering-and-sabotage/ https://www.istartedsomething.com/20140420/msn-messenger-and...

gopaz 5y ago

Not really sure what this platform contains, a backend, a site and an app? It sounds like if I would get 1% of the price to build this, I would laugh all the way to the bank.

johndoe42377 5y ago

Sweden is famous for its bone-headed bureaucracy and living by strict rules. Government in Sweden just cannot be wrong, be it immigration policies, gender policies or anything they do. If you disagree with them you are not progressive enough. One more thing. While government is migrant-welcoming (at least on paper) the population is extremely nationalist, not like in Japan, but not too far from it. Otherwise it is a very nice country.

waspight 5y ago

Is there a possibility to use OTA updates with expo since you are already using react native? To quicker get the header fixes out?

tibu 5y ago

Exactly the same is happening in Hungary. There was a huge educational system developed for schools from extremely huge budget but both the backend and front-end is crap. There was an alternative front-end built similar to the Swedish way but they were forced to shut it down.