I feel as if it was a necessary in the building blocks in american history. Without the constitutional convection who knows how we would be governed.
<span>Alexander the Great eventually established his administrative headquarters at "Babylon." Alexander captured Babylon after he left Egypt and marching towards Mesopotamia. He defeated Darius in the Battle of Gaugamela. In Babylon, he prepared many new campaigns in the invasion of Arabia but never realized them because he died.</span>
Last weekend, people across Hawaii spent 38 minutes thinking they were going to die because a government worker selected the wrong option on a missile alert interface. Multiple images, including several from the governor’s office , later circulated showing an interface similar to the screen the employee would have been using. They all shared the same quality: outdated, confusing, problematic design.
We don’t know if the system in Hawaii was ancient or simply poorly designed, but we know that no user-experience designer worth her salt would create a giant list of links or a drop-down menu for a lifesaving function. It’s the design equivalent of installing a hand-cranked engine on a Tesla or communicating with Alexa via smoke signals.
The incident in Hawaii exposes a problem far larger than a single confusing screen: Government is not good at buying, building and using technology. So maybe the most shocking part of this story is that mistakes like this don’t happen more frequently.
As former government technologists, we’ve worked as contractors and in civil service at federal and local levels, including buying and building out New Orleans’s emergency response systems. Over the past six months, we’ve also conducted in-depth interviews with people in and around government working to improve its technology and modernize its processes.
The thing that TVA accomplished was that i<span>t brought reform and development to the Tennessee Valley. </span>
