Infrastructure Abandonment: a recurring Talossan problem

[Miestră Schivă, UrN]

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:

• 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.
  

This happens again and again. Current examples:

• 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.

[Sir Txec dal Nordselvă, UrB]

Seeing as I have first hand  knowledge of just how difficult things can get, I get what you are saying. For example, whenever I start a new Clark, it takes me a couple attempts because the "order of events" on the database aren't specifically clear and if I do something out of order, I may have an active Clark but, as usually happens, the Clark doesn't include the Senate. I then have to stop it, re-do the steps (hopefully in order this time), and try again. The only saving grace is that my predecessor gave me a step-by-step guide, but if I forget to use the guide, the results are anyone's guess.

Another example is when I just expired several citizens. I enter the date, and click inactive. Then I scroll down in search of a submit button (every 100 names has a button). THEN, after I've pressed submit, I have to GO BACK to the citizen I just expired, do the whole thing a second time, and press submit. The same process occurs if I update an email address, change the spelling of a name, etc.

And...don't get me started on the Electoral Commission. I literally cannot remove one member and input a replacement, even though I secured a willing volunteer. MPF has to do that on the back end. When a member of the EC asked me "how do I validate?" I had to tell them, from memory of the last time I was on the EC, hoping I was right. As Secretary of State, I can't see the process to help someone along.

The database is full of cool things, but without full access, it is not entirely user-friendly (and I have a college degree in Information Technology so I know a few things).

[Antonio Montagnha, Ed. D.]

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.

This is an incredibly important point. In my experience as a long term small university administrator, it became a core principal that we bought our infrastructure or services off the shelf and with an eye to sustainability, but in terms of cost (free if possible) and in terms of maintenance and training.


As a matter of civil administration, not politics, it would be my advice to have any form of infrastructure go through a sustainability review before implementation, no matter how eager it's proponent. The body responsible for this review should have the power to deny approval without a sustainability plan.

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

This all makes sense to me for the most part. I understand the desire to create cool stuff even before you figure out if there's a need for it, and especially the desire to create cool stuff in the hopes of inventing a need for it. That last one is pretty much one of our core principles. But when it comes to technology, we can't indulge in that principle if it's ever going to interfere with any of our essential infrastructure.

I do strongly disagree about the law, though. There's no reason to treat it the same as something like a complicated database. There are almost no current regulatory burdens on anyone at this point, for example. There was a time when the government was required to regularly report to the people what they were doing, for example. This government deleted that provision, and most similar provisions are likewise gone. And since there's no actual real burden imposed, and because the law is pretty much all written in accessible English and organized according to topic, there's basically no drag imposed on our country from what is actually a very lean complete legal code. Plus, a lot of what's there is because of careful thoughts for future events. It might not seem obvious why specific phrasing is used for something like setting up Witt, but there's often a good reason for it. The principle of Chesterton's fence is always a good one to observe.