The Tradeoff Between Public Sector Apps Contests And Production-Quality Supported Software

Guest post by Dan Kasun, the Senior Director of Microsoft Public Sector Developer Evangelism. He blogs regularly at Techonomics and Government.

This is one of my original cartoons.

Apps contests, particularly in the public and civic sectors, are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I absolutely appreciate the concept of running contests to foster better visibility, innovative thinking, creativity, and incentives for community involvement… and I’ve seen some very cool applications come out of these contests.

That said, I think it would be a stretch to expect such contests to be an ongoing source of production-quality, supportable applications.  Contests are great catalysts and marketing exercises for both the contest holders and the participants, but it takes deep, committed engagement to develop solutions that will solve real government problems.

Translation: Gritty,hard software developer work ultimately requires proper incentives and compensation. Developers may be happy to contribute to open source projects,but it’s a mistake to think that development time is free. Free has its limits - everyone has at least one mouth to feed.