I wrote a little while back about a fairly terrible website being used by Cambridgeshire’s Transport Commission to consult people on their views.
Cambridge News now reports:
A PROBE into Cambridgeshire’s transport crisis – including the idea of a congestion charge for Cambridge – has been hit by a technical blunder.
The chairman of the Cambridgeshire Transport Commission, Sir Brian Briscoe, has revealed the commission’s website has been affected by “initial teething problems”.
The result is that some of the responses to the commission’s request for people’s views on how to tackle the traffic issue have been lost.
People are now being contacted to resubmit their views. Let’s hope they can be bothered.
Oh dear oh dear. I found out that this website cost the sum of £2,990 to produce. Now, that might not sound like a huge amount, but for a microsite like this it’s a sizable budget. What the Transport Commission got for their money was – frankly – piss poor, and it now turns out that it doesn’t even work properly.
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Dear god! Isn’t design by committee wonderful! Seriously, the amount of money that councils spend on outsourcing to contracted developers you would think that it would be more productive to pay for an internal developer to work on projects like this, using open source technology! Grrr…
Public sector bodies have an aversion to paying for internal developers, thanks to things like internal developers being classed as a revenue cost, while paying external developers is classed as a capital project.
However, paying for an external developer to develop that project with open source would probably have been better. I think we’d have struggled to cock it up that badly given that budget!
This is depressingly typical, though. I could rant on some other examples I’ve seen, but what’s the point? Nothing seems to be changing.