A couple days ago, I saw a tweet by Henry Blodget and replied:
@hblodget @TheStalwart yup. here is the seminal book on that http://t.co/nNGStKDiCy this is not war. surges don't work. open source it
— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) October 21, 2013
I am really upset by the problems with healthcare.gov. Leaving aside all the issues with Obamacare, and I hope and pray this discussion does not downgrade into a debate about that, I am very excited about the potential of marketplaces and marketplace economics on the price, availability, and transparency of healthcare insurance. It is way too complicated to buy healthcare insurance today and it costs way too much. The Internet and the power of marketplace economics has the potential to change that.
But our government has badly botched the construction of healthcare.gov and is now proposing a tech surge to fix it. More people, more money, and more promises thrown at a badly broken process. This will end about as well as Afghanistan and Iraq.
I'd like to suggest another way. Open source the healthcare.gov project, or at least all the components that easily lend themselves to open source. I think that some of it may already be open sourced. But instead of hiring an army of contract developers who will cost us so much money, harness an army of volunteers, who are likely better engineers, who will do the work for free.
That's what is increasingly done by technology companies and so much of the software that runs the web these days is open source. Why can't the software that runs our government be open sourced too? If you think this is a good idea, you can sign this petition. I signed it yesterday.
There is a lot going on in this area. My colleague Nick posted this link on usv.com today. GitHub now has a "subgit" on government projects. That's awesome and I hope we see the healthcare.gov codebase show up there soon.
