There is a recurring pattern in Talossa - increasingly so in recent years as we have become a bigger and more technologically sophisticated nation. I name it Infrastructure Abandonment, though surely there's a better name for it than that.
The cycle goes like this:
Do others get what I'm talking about in this vein? We have to set a standard that Talossan infrastructure should never be so complex that rank amateurs can't take over, if necessary.
The cycle goes like this:
- A Talossan, let's call them Txec Bloggescù, with certain technical or specialist skills takes on a project, and sets up an "infrastructure" for this purpose. This might be a tech set up, a particular legal framework, or an "aesthetic theme". The crucial thing is that it takes particular skills which are not universally shared to maintain this infrastructure.
- Txec Bloggescù runs out of energy, loses interests, has better things to do in their life, and has to leave the project behind.
- The problem happens where there is no successor with the same skills, who can operate the infrastructure, to keep the project going. If it's a personal vanity project, nothing is lost. But if it's - for example - now a vital piece of Talossan life, the whole nation is in trouble.
- The National Database. This is the big one at the moment. MPF set it up; only MPF can really operate it. MPF still cares about Talossa but has many better things to do with his life right now. You have seen the Secretary of State complaining about how unflexible and hard to "steer" the Database is, and is considering just abandoning it for the upcoming Seneschal election.
- The National Webspace. One of the big achievements of the "FreeDem" era of government was to nationalise all our websites under our own administration. Which assumes we have someone to administer it - someone who can find their way around a cPanel setup, for example. My problem right now, as incoming (temporary, I hope) Minister of STUFF and Technology is that my predecessor, Eðo, filled the talossa.com Wordpress backend with all manner of plugins and additional features which I neither understand the use of nor no how to operate. I think talossa.com is drastically "over-specced", hard to maintain properly, and needs to be downsized. But I really hope that I can get advice from tech-nerds on how to do that.
- Any number of legal provisions in El Lexhatx which sit idle because no-one wants to do anything with them, or don't have the grasp of "legalese" required to fix them.
- A couple of examples from the Fiovan Provincial Chancery. My predecessor in the Fiova SoS role, Üc Tärfa, set up a fancy scheme in Wiki markup to track bills and decisions of the Fiovan General Assembly. It is a good thing that the GA has been very quiet over the last few years, because I can't make head or tail of that coding and I don't know how to update it properly! But conversely: I realised that, when I step aside from the role, I had better hope my successor understands the provisions for Single Transferable Vote elections to the Prasidïeu that I wrote. They're pretty clear for electoral-politics nerds, but might as well be Klingon to anyone who doesn't know what a Droop quota is.
Do others get what I'm talking about in this vein? We have to set a standard that Talossan infrastructure should never be so complex that rank amateurs can't take over, if necessary.