[dnesting]

Hi Daniel, thanks for your perspective.

My own perspective: There are amazingly smart people working in government, and even working for many of the contractors commonly cited as examples of The Problem. Many of these individuals are not effective not because they're incompetent (and therefore need to be told what to do), but because they are not empowered, or they lack confidence or a team of people they can use to propel good solutions forward. Bureaucracy and internal politics are rampant. One way to look at what we're trying to do here is to act as a nucleus of tech expertise inside these agencies, to attract and empower those individuals to do the right thing while providing air cover from the White House when they're prevented from doing so.

That being said, there is a vanishingly small number of actual engineers working for the government. Normally this role belongs to the contracting companies. The incentives here frequently encourage overly large, excessively complex designs, and implementations that maximize the number of humans rather than good engineering practices. By improving technical literacy within government we improve the government's ability to identify bad contracts and methods to prevent these situations from happening in the future.

We are not blind to the fact that there have been other attempts before us. The key differences I see are (a) support from the top and (b) funding.

[DanielBMarkham]

Please email me if there is any way I can help. Also, since I both teach team performance enhancement and have a lot of big org experience, I would be very interested in hearing how things go.

Best of luck!