I don't know. Dvorak's an idiot but O'Reilly's belief that you can determine how qualified someone is for the highest technology post in the U.S. after "a few minutes" seems just as foolish.
Exactly. John C. Dvorak is a professional internet troll disguised as a tech journalist. He uses misinformed rants ( or "controversial opinions" if you like the euphemism better ) as a source of hits. He has trolled the FLOSS and Mac communities for years. But trolling the White House ?. That's effing crazy.
Please don't attack the messenger, even for a bad story.
Unless you have proof that Dvorak was purposely lying, slandering him doesn't make your case any better.
After all, if he screws this one up, he's going to have a very hard time getting respectability and credibility for future articles. That punishment is enough.
That phrase has always referred to someone delivering an unwanted truth. There was no "message" here at all, and no "messenger". "Please don't attack the libeler" would be more accurate. That doesn't pack the same pseudo-compassionate punch, does it?
Unless you have proof that Dvorak was purposely lying
That is an impossibly high and irrelevant bar. Gross irresponsibility, incompetence, and total disrespect for the truth aren't enough for you?
slandering him
Wow. That's a rich use of the word "slander", considering the activity this guy was just engaging in.
Gross irresponsibility, incompetence, and total disrespect for the truth aren't enough for you?
Please demonstrate this is the case. All I see is a guy who thought he had a hot story, made a few calls, and published before he got all the facts. Looks like the confusion in school names is what led to this.
Where is all of this terrible negligence you mention?
I consider myself pretty open minded but I honestly can't even see where you're coming from here. The question here was "Did the man have the degree he claimed to?" and that story involved 2, only TWO, facts. The University he claimed the degree is from and the type of degree.
Of those 2 facts, Dvorak failed to correctly verify one of them and then drew a false conclusion based on that and screwed up the second one. That would be journalistic negligence from anyone. But when you add Dvorak having admitted to writing stories just to generate traffic (http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/9838/) you get a picture of a dishonest man.
I don't know anything about him either. My opinion has nothing to do with Dvorak. It has to do with your painting him as a victim of defamation when he obviously was the one doing the defaming.
Under United States law, it's difficult indeed to prove defamation of a public official by a news media organization. My current view of today's news is that Dvorak was sloppy, but that his conduct doesn't constitute the "actual malice" that the Supreme Court requires for a successful defamation claim in such circumstances.
This gets directly into motivation, as I pointed out. If Dvorak purposely defamed somebody, that's one thing. I'd love to hear evidence about that.
If, on the other hand, he was just being sloppy, then it's a mistake. Let it go. All this name-calling says more about the name-callers than it does about Dvorak.
People who are sloppy and get slammed don't "deserve" it. Screw-ups happen. I'm perfectly willing to let some columnist I don't read the benefit of the doubt of screwing up. In return, I'd appreciate it if people gave me the same benefit of the doubt. This is just common sense.
Look at it this way -- isn't this an excellent example of the net publishing bad information and then correcting itself almost immediately? With any other story, people would be talking about how much better we have things now than when we only had printed media.
Dvorak has a reputation for publishing these screw-ups. It has been going on for years. The guy is the shock jock of tech columnists, or maybe a Bill O'Reilly, or at least that has been his reputation for a long time. This sort of history, going back years, should be taken into account when people judge the most recent actions. This is just common sense.
Your personal ignorance does not mean you are correct to chide those who do know of Dvorak and his history.
So if I understand you correctly, you're saying once you get to know Dvorak, he really is a jackass.
Let's grant your point. Then still, why call it out? Let's suppose Dvorak is the worst jackass in the history of jackasses. Let's also suppose that anybody who knew Dvorak would agree that he is the epitome of jackasses. Proper response: "Remember when Dvorak did X, Y, and Z? I'm not sure what the situation is now, but this looks like it might be one of those situations."
Why get so emotional? It's just a web column, for chrissakes. The truth was outed almost immediately. Whatever damage happened happened for about 2 hours. Do you guys live some kind of perverse emotional life through these tech columnists? If so, get a life already. Words are cheap. That's why we always ask for links, and double-check sources.
When you call somebody a name, you're attempting to shut down anything useful they might have to offer in the future. It's the ultimate ad hominem argument: no need to listen to anything Dvorak says because he's an X.
I think it's completely idiotic to go there. Everybody has something useful to offer at some time or another.
In those Frankenstein movies there always was a large crowd with torches and pitchforks who stormed the castle looking for the monster. I'm sure there was some guy in the back who was going, "Hey guys, couldn't we just send the sheriff? Why all the yelling and panic?"
"Why get so emotional? It's just a web column, for chrissakes. The truth was outed almost immediately. Whatever damage happened happened for about 2 hours."
And during those two hours this story was everywhere. Remember the old saying: a lie can run halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on.
Its dishonest to imply the degree is from University of Maryland. UMUC is not UMCP. It is in the University of Maryland system, it is not "University of Maryland".
UMCP is no more the definitive "University of Maryland" than UMUC. While they may be the "flagship" university in the system, according to their site, they are still UMCP, not simply UM.
Saying you made a few phone calls does not constitute proof of anything. Dvorak put forward more evidence to support his claim than the author of the nextgov piece. Yeah, that claim is from the article, but are we supposed to simply take his word for it?
I don't say I "believe" the nextgov piece simply because he published it. There is less of a barrier to publication there since its not tearing down a person. But if your going to publish an accusation like Dvorak did, you better have done _all_ your homework.
So now he's got to live with this Charlie Foxtrot for the rest of his life. Digging down into the sewer with him and throwing it around some doesn't help anybody.
All the other "Charlie Foxtrots" (btw, wtf?) that he's perpetrated up until now, he doesn't have to live with those? How many inflammatory fuckups does a person get to commit before its fair game to point out that they're a jackass?
Wow, you really think he might lose his job over this? I hadn't even really allowed myself to dream such a thing. That would be peaches, though.
Let's be clear: Dvorak isn't just some guy, he's a professional troll. We're not picking him out of obscurity and pantsing him in front of his classmates. He chooses to be a writer, to push people's buttons, to publish inflammatory material without doing any kind of research. If he loses his job, it'll only be because this is somehow the first time he's actually crossed the line into libel, and if he's a mockery for the rest of his life, he's in the same state he was a week ago, except now maybe some political junkies are in on it, too.
I think the followup to this story -- the impact on blogging, relationship of a columnist as a reporter, the degree of fact-checking needed before publishing, what, if anything happens to Dvorak -- is going to be much more interesting than the story itself.
Then politely point out the times he did beforehand. Did he not do enough research and make a politically-charged article in the past? Then that's germane to the conversation. We'd like to hear about it.
One amusing incident was when he took Microsoft to task for creating a "System Idle Process" that uses up all his available CPU time. That's about the time I stopped reading his column.
Consider the radical possibility that any person you disagree with in general might accidentally make a correct factual statement in a particular case.
This is why professional journalists actually pick up the phone and call people before publishing accusations about them. And this is also why bloggers and "online columnists" are often not considered real journalists.
Dvorak said he telephoned the White House for comment on his story. That is what caught my eye in that story, the lack of White House immediate response.
True, but you can't just make a token phone call so that you can write that they didn't return your calls.
I think it's pretty irresponsible to publish a hit piece on someone with making an honest effort to get their side of it. Om Malik was able to track Kundra down and get response within hours.
Dvorak called the University of Maryland, College Park and they said they had no record of him receiving a degree at there, which is what everyone things of when they read University of Maryland. NextGov confirmed he has an MS at UMUC, which might have a shared history with UMD, but only UMD is allowed to be known as the University of Maryland.
This is so obviously a non-story, or at least not worth more than a short, transparency inspired blog post. Of all Dvoraks bonehead stories, this one takes the cake.
Still, I'd like to see Kundra's bio updated to reflect the actual university he received that degree from. I would never say I received an MS from the University of Texas, when in fact I received one from some other UT system school, and certainly wouldn't phrase it that way on my .gov bio page.
Sorry to ask the obvious question, but who cares? IS Programs (even the top ones) aren't the most rigorous things in the world. Anyone who is in a CIO type position should probably have real world experience, professional degrees be damned. Why aren't we talking about that instead?
Agreed. The fact is he did a pretty good job with the DC.gov websites according to just about everyone involved. They're the most data rich and accessible complex government site I've ever seen. e.g. http://data.octo.dc.gov/
Visual design aside, DC may well have the best website of any city or state in the country.
Visual design aside, there's a distinct possibility that DC.gov is one of the most data rich government sites out there. The only problem is, well, finding the information. The findability level of this information is about like the hand-curated Yahoo! Directory from 1999.
And then there's accessibility. Maybe that means something different to you than me, but let's delve into it.
First of all, the page uses tables. That makes it a nightmare for any screen-reading software to utilize.
Turning off styles and javascript renders the main navigation useless.
The markup of the page is entirely table cells and font tags, granting no semantic meaning to the content whatsoever. This makes deep-searching the site even more problematic, as search engines have no context for the textual information contained within the page. E.g.; Google looks at h1 elements as having more important content than, say, a p element. It also limits the usefulness of screenreaders, as they read cell by cell, row by row. (thus, if two related pieces of content are in two cells, one on top of each other, they won't be read together - it will read the first one, then finish up the row before continuing on with the second cell).
Then there's deep-link URLs like, http://www.rrc.dc.gov/rrc/cwp/view,a,1182,q,447149,rrcNav_GI.... What does that even mean? Is it some attempt at securing the "Play in DC" page (which, to be honest, is fairly useless: all it does is list links to the history, entertainment, libraries, etc subpages.. the only reason it's needed is because the entire site design is one big Charlie Foxtrot).
Anyone who thinks this website is a "pretty good job" and has anything to do with: design, usability, accessibility, and SEO - well, you should probably turn in your card. Sorry to say. And if a C-level executive doesn't understand how -- especially with government sites -- accessibility for visually impaired individuals is extremely important, well. He either needs to be educated or, if ineffective, fired. It's nearly criminal (especially for a government website).
In finality:
Being a data rich site means nothing if accessing that data is akin to crawling through a swimming pool filled with broken glass and lemon juice. And then not even getting the information you were looking for when you first dove into the miasma of pain.
OK, so find a city or state website anywhere in this country that does better.
Most municipalities don't even have government data available in scanned PDFs, let alone a huge set of documented XML feeds published live on the website.
(And incidentally, it's a myth that screen readers require semantic markup with CSS to work. They do not. Nor does Section 508 require it. Screen readers generally work just fine with table-based tag soup. The dc.gov site claims to be Bobby 508 compliant and I'm not in a position to dispute that.)
Anywhere in our luddite country? not likely. If I could read european languages, I'm sure I could find one in, e.g., Sweden.
Even if Section 508 doesn't require semantic markup, it still doesn't fix my primary issue with the site: zero findability. Let's see if I can find, say, a map of the DC metro from DC.gov. Probably a pretty common action. Except there's no link to it anywhere. Not that bad, I suppose - google brings up the first result, and most people would probably start there anyway. If I were adamant about using DC.gov to find it, though, I would have to click on "Residents" (what if I'm a visiting tourist?), find the "Ride the Rails" (what a worthless title!) link, find the Metro link (listed last - Amtrak is listed first. Do people in DC use Amtrak more than the Metro?), and then finally I find wmata.com. (what a useless domain name, why not.. oh.. dcmetro.com is being sat on.)
What's another piece of data I might, as a constituent, want to look up? Maybe something to do with politics. Maybe I just moved to the area and want to know who my representative is.
Government -> DC Council gets me a list of councilmembers and which ward they're elected from (ward1, ward2, etc), along with their phone number. Fairly useful, if I know which ward I live in. Let's see if I can figure that out from the website, without using google.
Live in DC -> Civic Information -> ehhh, nothing useful for my quest here. Let's try another route.
Search box: "ward" results in a search results page which lists some full-english questions (that look naggingly like the sponsored links on google's results), one of which ("Where can I find information about wards?" - if this is a frequent search, they should probably think about making this more prominent on the homepage) looks like it might be able to help me. The rest of the results are garbage.
Oh, damn. That link resulted in a 404. Of course, if I were someone normal I probably would have just googled "washington dc wards" and found the wikipedia page which gives me the information I wanted.
Now, let's see how it gives me information about parks. Parks are pretty important in an urban environment, right? Say I have a dog, let's see what it takes to find a dog park in washington dc with their site.
Residents -> Play in DC -> Parks and Recreation -> oh, damn. I just found a list of stuff that I don't really care about. Registry, department of parks, national park service... No, just give me say .. uh, a map of the parks? That's what I'm looking for. Maybe some events happening in the parks. Let's see if the Department of Parks link helps me. Ah, nope. Just a bunch of red links that look scary to click on and are impossible to skim (to find what I'm looking for). And a picture of some random woman in the header with the title, "Department of Parks and Recreation." I'm guessing it's someone who runs the stuff, but I wouldn't know from the title. Ah, here it is. In this list of serifed, red, bold links. Dog Parks. I actually have to spend about 10 seconds searching for the link again every time I go back to that main page listing. Those brightly colored boxes announcing aquatic programs and tennis programs kept drawing my eye over to the right, distracting me from what I was looking for. Alright, after clicking on "Dog Parks," I get another list of links. This is getting tiresome. Fortunately, one of them is "Dog park locations." Cool, there's two of them. Unfortunately, in order to see where they are on a map (remember, I hypothetically just moved here!) I've got to copy-paste the address into google maps. Why not just provide a link?
And the most prominent think on the "Dog Park Locations" page is uh. "Dog Park Rules & Regulations," a link to another page entirely. Not the locations. Weird thing is, a google search brings up a page from doggeeks.com listing even more dog parks than are listed on the dc.gov page. Good goin'.
Let's approach it as a developer. Say I want to make a mashup with one of their documented XML feeds. Can't find anything. I give up.
One cool thing, if rather hidden (findability!) is the school map. You have to go to that tiny dropdown on the bottom left of the main page labeled "Searchable Databases" (very useful title, by the way). Cool, there's a splash page with a screenshot of the tool and a notice that it's now available. That's nice, but I wanted to access the tool, not find out if it's available. I'd assume that going directly to the tool would effectively tell me that it's available.
In short: while I'm not belittling the sheer amount of information available on the site, actually finding and utilizing that information is an exercise in pain, suffering, and frustration. Information is worthless if you can't find it. It's a step in the right direction, and they got the hard part done (getting all the data digitized and available online). Now they just need to bring the interaction style (SELECT elements with onChange firing a navigation event? Welcome to 1999 and Usability Hell) and usability of the site into this century.
And this isn't even going into the HTML and CSS validation errors.
My comments aren't to belittle the engineers who worked on getting the information out there. It's belittling the fact that they hired cut-rate front-end developers and information architects, and ended up with a site that's mostly worthless unless you know its cthonic structure by heart. And it probably cost them a bundle, too, wasting their taxpayer's dollars by building a UI/front end that'll likely need to be rebuilt entirely from the ground up if they want people to, well, actually use the damn thing. And if the UI layer's code is anything as atrocious as the markup and IA is.. well, let's just say I'm glad I'm not the one spelunking my way through that guano cave.
Hey, I never said it was perfect, but do you agree it's the best in the country? I submit that this fact is evidence that making a good government site is harder than it looks. Or do you really believe every single other city and state technology office is full of luddites?
Yes, findability is a problem. It's probably always going to be a problem when you've got lots of pages generated by dozens of autonomous agencies. But most government sites don't have this problem because they don't bother putting any of this information online in the first place. It either doesn't exist or exists only on paper. I'd take a site full of useful information that's a bit hard to navigate over a pretty site with nothing on it.
Also, I take issue with some of your examples. If you click on "Visitors" there are indeed links to Metro right on the main visitors page. It's a different domain because it's a different entity; Metro extends well outside the city limits and is funded by DC, VA, and MD. Also if you had searched for "ward" or "what's my ward" the first link is How can I use "Where You Live" to find out about DC neighborhoods, wards, and school districts? (DC Guide) which would have answered several of your other complaints. Search for "xml feeds" and the first link it to the catalog of XML feeds. It ain't perfect, but it ain't nearly as bad as you make it out to be.
> Or do you really believe every single other city and state technology office is full of luddites?
They don't have to be filled with luddites to have a crappy webpage. They just need a crappy IT staff or to hire some 'lowest bidder' option to build their site that learned HTML by reading some Microsoft Press book on Frontpage.
There are some sites that have perfectly fine webpages that are screwed up because bureaucrat somewhere decides that the site needs to be 'updated' either because they feel that flash animations on the front page are 'the next big thing' or because they want to hire a friend/campaign contributor to do the job. Then they end up with a site that it worse off than the one they had in the first place, but they don't fix it because then they would be admitting that they wasted all the money that's already been sunk into the project.
Worthless or not, they still shouldn't lie about receiving the degree.
EDIT: Do the downvotes imply that people here think it's OK to lie about credentials as long as you think that the credential you're lying about is worthless? Or what else are the downvotes expressing?
1) People trusted a random blogger over people getting paid full time to vet people. Understandably vetters miss things such as taxes (complicated) or illegal immigrant maids (hidden), but something as simple as a degree will get checked.
2) Dvorak didn't call all the campuses, there are multiple UMD campuses just like there are multiple Penn State campuses etc.
3) Dvorak trusted it based on the sole person he talked to. Does the school even have the obligation to tell a complete stranger these things? Did he try and find people who knew Dvorak in college? Did he find anyone but himself who thought to the contrary? Everyone has enemies, when you get thrust into public office they come out posting stuff against you, if you had skipped college someone would know.
4) Dvorak's question about teaching was trying to slide tense under the radar. He asked if Kundra was a professor. The person he talked to said no. That person was probably just an operator with a directory of proffessor RIGHT NOW. How did he know they looked at a list with every person who ever gave a lecture at UMD?
Maybe at the Federal level the 'vetters' are held to a higher standard, but I remember a local government official (can't remember if it was city or county level) in Michigan getting called to task over a degree that he never actually earned (or even went to the school). He had been on the job a few (3-4?) years when this came out. I can't remember the details of what happened, but some people wanted to overlook the lie because he was actually doing a good job in his position (i.e. he wasn't incompetent, just a liar I guess). It was in the Detroit area, I guess someone could look it up if they were interested for a similar case, though on a local rather than a Federal level.
From my impression, Dvorak was simply raising the questions, which based on the (incomplete) facts he found, seems perfectly valid to ask about someone in such a high position.
Now that the question has been answered about his degrees, great; let's move on.
University of Maryland University College is not exactly the same as the University of Maryland. It's their adult continuing education program basically.
"However, in 1997 the Maryland General Assembly passed legislation allowing the University of Maryland, College Park to be known simply as the University of Maryland, recognizing the campus' role as the flagship institution of the University System of Maryland."
No one of thinks "oh one of those Maryland universities with different faculties and different quality of education" when they hear University of Maryland. They think of College Park.
It may be splitting hairs, but we shouldn't even be having this conversation, as it should be clear on the bio page.
I didn't know that, so I guess you have a point, but it does indeed sound like splitting hairs.
And the reason we are having this conversation is because Dvorak screwed up pretty badly and implied he had no degree at all. No one would have noticed a post alleging that he committed the crime of omitting the name of his college campus from his resume.
The fact that this is even a story is pretty distressing. As far as I can tell, the guy's gotten good results, which is much more than I can say for plenty of "qualified" people in Washington.
It still says something about someone's character nonetheless. Just because he's getting good results, doesn't also mean that he is not doing something dishonest in the shadows, while performing his duties admirably in the limelight.
I think it's important that if you are going to raise questions about someone's reputation, you make a real effort to find answers before throwing those questions out into the public. An irresponsible question can still be very misleading.
I'm going to side with Dvorak here. "University of Maryland, University College" is a correspondence school. These days they also have online classes of course. They offer only nontechnical majors, including Information Systems Management (they do not offer CS, Math, Physics, etc). I believe many of the courses at UMUC aren't even accepted as transfer credits to the University of Maryland.
The bottom line is that everyone who has gone to school at a state school in maryland knows that "University of Maryland" == "College Park". To list UMD as where you got your degree when you went to UMUC is both technically incorrect, and intentionally misleading.
