Thread by @spongepaddy

In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway. The city's local government, @Stockholmsstad, spent 1 billion Swedish crowns (100 million dollars) over 7 years to build a massive do-everything school IT platform, which students, teachers and parents are forced to use.

And their app is awful. Slow, buggy, almost unusable. One parent managed to access other people's private data, leading to @Stockholmsstad being fined for bad security. So a few parents decided, since the data is basically their data, to build their own better version.

A couple of months later, @oppnaskolplatt was ready. Open source, faster, safer, better. But. Instead of welcoming a clever open source initatitve that solved all the problems that they created, @Stockholmsstad instead went on the attack.

They called the app possibly illegal (it's not). They attacked its creators in the media. And now they have decided to actively sabotage it. Using their hugely expensive consultants, @Stockholmsstad now make tiny changes to the data structures, day in and day out.

Not to help their users, but to actively sabotage the @oppnaskolplatt app. Every time they do it, burning up tax money (including mine) at a furious rate, @oppnaskolplatt has to do updates. And they do. Over and over and over.

The latest "update" changed the name of one thing in their data, just to force @oppnaskolplatt to do a fix. @Stockholmsstad are now acting like angry toddlers. Only the toys they are throwing about are our tax money, tossed into the 100 million dollar fire.

And the moral of this tale? Don't buy huge expensive IT systems. JUST DON'T. Ask your users what they want. Make things open source. And if someone wants to help you ... then just fucking let them.

Wow, this blew up! Thanks all for spreading the word about this important issue. Let's keep the pressure on. And hey, why not buy my books...?
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