

Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown shuts down government transparency website - danso
http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2011/11/jerry-brown-shuts-down-california-government-transparency-website.html

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danso
The merits of this decision seem silly...how hard is it to maintain a domain
even if it is nothing but a centralized list of links? To most non-savvy
Internet users, that is extremely helpful.

It's possible that whoever in the government was in charge of setting this up
bought into an unnecessary contract solution in which there were dedicated
servers, infrastructure, and (idle) IT people for what is basically a
mirror/aggregation site that could be heavily cached. Or, the maintenance
costs are actually very cheap, but to Jerry Brown and his CTO, a "whole
website" sounds like it must cost millions to maintain. So, better to shut it
down, even if in reality it costs $50 a year.

If it is either of these cases, another object lesson in what happens when
those in charge have not even the most basic understanding of how information
is structured and transmitted on the Internet. And this is the state that
houses Silicon Valley?

On the other hand, props to the web designer who thought of using a blurred
screengrab of the dead site as the background. What better way to communicate
the state's movement towards opaqueness?

