Chris whitaker problem interview

Problem Interview w/ Chris Whitaker - Consultant @ Smart Chicago Collaborative

Job Title: Consultant/ Project Manager

Company: Civic Whitaker/ Smart Chicago Collaborative

Company size: 3 FTE; 12 part-time/vendor consultants

In-house developers: the 12 consulting part-time/vendor developers

In-house open-source devs: Almost exclusively open-source developers

Open-source projects used: Smaller-scale; only closed-source is Twilio

Budget for open-source: 10 projects * $10,000 or less, SaaS subscriptions; e.g., LocalWiki only has hosting costs; mostly paying for developers not for projects/products

How do you decide to buy open-source software? Pick organizations by mission, determine challenges & needs, go shopping; hire consultants based on resume, reputation, and portfolio

Do you use open-source on projects with tight, frequent deadlines? So far no, our projects don’t; we avoid projects with hard fast deadlines because we’re not a software development company Only sensitive one is/was healthcare.gov reminder (lulz)

Problem ranking:

• Beyond technical ability

Other problems:

• Monitor ruby closely; ruby security flaw came out and lots of my stream was talking about it
• Need expertise in-house as vendor/consultant on staff to do dev work

quick codesy.io pitch & feedback customer? tech-heavy type of process; defer to developers - Scott Robin; tricky because all spending has to be justified to Trust re: benefit to greater community: “All of our projects are running into this pain point.” We would probably pay our dev to fix the upstream bug ourselves than try to bid for it

refer to others? Chris Jansen - Public Good Software? Derek Eter? Scott Robin -

pay for the solution?