This is what happens when performance reviews are tied to outages. I spent over five years at AWS, and even internally we treated the AWS status page as a running joke -- a bunch of us used an extension which just set the level of every outage to one higher than had been posted (i.e., green i/blue diamond was yellow, yellow was red).
The problem is, organisational leaders have performance reviews (and bonuses) tied to service health, and they'll avoid declaring outages to avoid looking bad.
The Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV) of the Norwegian government is doing exactly that, we have been opening up our code since 2018 and are accepting pull requests across our 2000 public repositories from those who want to improve government services https://github.com/navikt this has also enabled a much more close collaboration between new and existing partners that was previously unheard of!
I think the main reason why this is not done actively in Germany, is missing people with expertise. Lots of old guys from the pre-internet era taking care of the technical systems. Unfortunately, the gov is not doing much to make at least official positions attractive to young programmers. And of course, if it's done by a contractor, they do not wat to share any code with the public.
This might be because the government is a really unattractive employer both in terms of culture and remuneration.
However I have met some truly brilliant people working for the city of Berlin. They're just limited by red tape and diffusion of responsibilities, not to mention the amount of work that needs doing.
Opening the code up to pull requests could give the city IT a free boost from motivated citizens, I think.
The largest branch of the Norwegian government, Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV), have adopted this this policy since 2018 and now we have over 2000 public repositories on https://github.com/navikt and https://github.com/nais (last one is our platform organization)
I read uninteresting as not very very useful for an external party in general. It was likely developed for an organization's fairly unique needs, is probably not very well documented, and there's no community in the sense that most genuinely useful open source projects have. Dumping a big one-off repo of code is fine but probably no one's going to put the work into seeing if this project that was never intended to be general-purpose is worth trying to adapt for something else.
Exactly this. It's like our websites and some other tools for our particular needs. We have, on rare occasion, gotten PRs from earnest supporters but they have no idea what our product needs are and we can't just merge in stuff that nobody asked for and hasn't been tested.
