This is a great teaching moment for anyone who works in UX or observability, but it's worth keeping in mind that the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (who operate the Emergency Alert Service (EAS)) has a yearly operating budget of around $17MM this year. The system itself was launched in 1997.
This is a legacy software (and hardware!) system with a relatively small budget and number of employees that needs to coordinate with other large organizations (FEMA, HI-EMA, NOAA, etc.). I think the most interesting lessons to learn from this have to do with long term software maintenance. I'm sure folks at the FCC/*EMA knew that this UI was janky but why did they not have the budget/power to fix it? How do we ensure that the public sector can benefit from the technical advances that most people on hacker news take for granted? Curious to hear from folks with experience in relevant parts of the government.
This is a legacy software (and hardware!) system with a relatively small budget and number of employees that needs to coordinate with other large organizations (FEMA, HI-EMA, NOAA, etc.). I think the most interesting lessons to learn from this have to do with long term software maintenance. I'm sure folks at the FCC/*EMA knew that this UI was janky but why did they not have the budget/power to fix it? How do we ensure that the public sector can benefit from the technical advances that most people on hacker news take for granted? Curious to hear from folks with experience in relevant parts of the government.