A good source of cheap Twitter fun over the past few weeks: the Twitter stream of Obama campaign tech veterans. They are reading the stories about healthcare.gov. They are hearing the punditry that can be boiled down to “Obama’s campaign worked, why can’t his health care site”? They are rich with lulz. Harper Reed has retweeted scores of jokes about how he, personally, should fix everything.
…and @harper looked down and said, “RT”. RT @kaisdavis: ‘… as if millions of voices cried out “Help us @harper, you’re our only hope.”’ — TramMAUL (@trammell) October 22, 2013
He’s also mocked the GOP for not grokking Web development.
Excited for Ted Cruz’s statement on software development practices. He is probably a strict waterfall type. Or literally a scrum master. — harper (@harper) October 21, 2013
Tim Murphy has spun off this feedback and talked to other Obama for America veterans, coming back with an ominous story about how healthcare.gov is by nature a google times more complex than a start-from-scratch campaign site. One veteran tells him that the odds of success for a project that wrangles “hundreds of different health insurance providers and dozens of state databases” were “in the single digits.” It’s also refreshing to hear someone point out that “Obama hires old campaign team for lucrative health care contract” would have been a scandal all its own.
Lee did not comment for Murphy’s story. His advice for a healthcare.gov fix is limited to a small series of tweets, sent apparently before he went to Rome for a conference.
There are a lot of solutions for the http://t.co/rGsXEhDvTB fiasco that don’t require a “tech surge.” … — harper (@harper) October 21, 2013
… Focus on user experience - little wins that give the users a feeling of progress. Meanwhile, spend time fixing the back ends. — harper (@harper) October 21, 2013
Do not take the sites down. That doesn’t make sense. Make the user experience better in times of failure. — harper (@harper) October 21, 2013
The “secret” here is that the problems are not about tech at all. It is about procurement. I can’t fix that with my tech chops or my team. — harper (@harper) October 21, 2013