In the context of the debate on the role of government on the Internet, many voices claim that government should not develop portals, but expose data and web services so that private intermediaries create value added services. Gartner is evangelizing on this; Princeton scholars published a recent paper on the topic; both Farmsubsidy.org and PatientOpinion.org.uk emphasize this in their “coopetition” with government portals.
Basically, they argue government is not very good at doing portals and service to users. I quite agree and argue on similar lines.
We have now another example to add tho the list of government mismanagement of IT.
Europeana, the European Digital Library, went online with grand declaration on November 22nd, crashed , because of excessive demand after few hours and will re-open in one month.
Probably the last bit is the most worrying. Ok it can be cool to crash due to excessive demand, but in today’s world of “clouds and virtualisation” one month sounds like a geologic era. Compared to this, Twitter is a fully reliable service!

,

Powered by ScribeFire.