The Honor System for Records Management

 A recent newspaper article (Times or Post?) noted that enforcement of the Federal Records Act is entrusted to the honor system. What does that mean?

 When I joined ASCS it had a Records Management Branch in its Administrative Services Division. It had been strengthened as a result of Congressional scrutiny of the Billie Sol Estes scandal.  (The investigators found that ASCS didn't have a good system for filing correspondence and policy papers.) 

The focus of the branch's work was establishing and maintaining a system for filing correspondence, and prescribing a filing system for offices originating policy decisions. Once established the routine was almost self-executing.  New secretaries would be shown what to do: original and carbons, yellow is official record, green is addressee folder, etc.  In my view there wasn't any explanation of the rationale for the way it was designed.

The records management people in the agency were effectively outsiders, people who might show up occasionally, but without any day-to-day contact with the workers   If that was true for fellow employees of ASCS, it was doubly true for the people involved with records management at the departmental level, and quadruply true for the employees of the National Archives and Records Adminstration.

How might this translate to the Executive Office of the President? On the one hand there must be a greater consciousness of the importance of records, given the constant scrutiny by journalists and investigators and the looming historians.  On the other hand the office has a lot more going on than any agency.  On the third hand, at the end of an administration I imagine it's like when you decide to retire, you zero in on the future and care much less about the wrapping up. Finally, your boss couldn't care less about records. 

[Update: given the discovery of more documents in Biden's places and today's discovery of documents in Pence's place, I think my "third hand" is well supported. I suspect you'd find a few classified documents in possession of a lot of high, and not so high, officials.]

Silos, Innovation, and the Internet

 I remember the burst of enthusiasm surrounding the discovery that the Internet/WWW could be used for business.  Soon it became mandatory for every business to have its own website. Expertise in doing sites was short, so some found a profitable business in creating websites.  I still hear their advertisements from time to time.

Normally I prefer to do business in writing rather than talking, so that meant I was happy with this innovation.  And more and more I found the businesses with whom I wanted to deal had websites.

In the past few years, though, I've tried to deal with businesses who have websites but who don't respond when I send them an email or fill out the contact form on the site.  Sometimes I've reverted to calling them, but usually they lose my business.

What's going on?  I've no proof, not even any data, but my suspicion is it's part of a general parttern:  when an organization has something new to do they:

• may contract it out, or set up a new group to do it.
• they rarely look at how it could impact or improve their existing operations--it's easier to keep doing what is familiar and comfortably within their knowledge and capabilities.
• once the new function (in this case a website) is set up, the initial enthusiasm which evoked the decision, money, and time needed to creat it tends to ebb, especially if the website doesn't show immediate payoffs.
• the end result is the website becomes a dusty relic of some bigshot's pet project  

You perhaps can guess that I think some of this applies to past initiatives by ASCS/FSA/USDA to change the way they operate. 

Indeed, I think it's part of the way our government works.  Part of the life cycle of government initiatives.

[In summary: often the way organizations innovate is by addition, not substitution, which leads to silos.]

Contrarians--Genetic?

 I've long experience with contrarians--my sister was one.  I lean that way myself.

I wonder whether it's genetic or cultural?  Do "tight" societies , presumably ones less welcoming of contrarians, have fewer, or any at all?  I'd assume there might be an evolutionary basis--seems as if the species could benefit by having a few around, just as it presumably benefits by having a few left handers around.  On the other hand, while I'm a confirmed right handers, I was able to train myself to use the mouse left-handed when I was getting carpal tunnel pains.

Inverted Social Norms

Back the day rural areas were viewed positively, with high morality, great character, all the virtues (at least so my mother thought). Meanwhile urban areas were viewed negatively, with dubious morality, poor character, divorce, gambling, drugs,  many dangers. By the 1970's it was clear where the balance of goodness was.

These days it seems that rural areas are the ones with problems, higher death rates, drugs, broken marriages, etc.   Meanwhile the gentrified urban areas and suburbs are seeing a new social conservatism--less sex outside of partnerships or marriage, indeed less divorce, less smoking, etc. 

Bar/CR Codes for Classified Documents?

 I had very limited exposure to the classification system for government documents during my time in ASCS/FSA.  IIRC ASCS did get some classified documents as part of the distribution system for the agricultural attaches stationed in some embassies.  I'm not sure why some, a few I think, were classified; perhaps the attaches had a report on the status of a nation's crops which were obtained by befriending a statistician--I don't know.  Anyhow, a management analyst in Records Management had a clearance and handled them.  I suspect the whole setup was a carryover from New Deal days, before USDA silos were built up, possibly before Foreign Agricultural Service was formed.

Anyhow, I'm not surprised by problems in handling and tracking classified documents.  You might be able to have secure handling if you used a dedicated database with no ability to copy, download, or print.  That way you could track the user ids anytime a document was read.  But, with the possible exception of the most highly classified, that's not practical.  (It does seem that when documents are viewed in a SCIF that while they could be printed, nothing could be taken out of the facility. 

For the more ordinary classified documents, I wonder if they have a system of bar coding or CR coding for them. The problem of course would still be the copying, printing, downloading--how do you assign a unique identifier to the copy, printout, or downloaded document?  If election officials and USPS can assign a unique code to a ballot so it can be tracked, but they don't deal with  duplication.

Rear Ends and Third Parties

 I've been rear-ended twice in about 3 years, both times in leased vehicles. No major damage or injuries in either.  Both times I'd argue a third party caused it.  Both times on Reston Parkway.  In the first a car very quickly moved from the lane on my rear into my lane and over to the lane on my left. I had to brake sharply, and the man behind me was unable to stop in time.  In the second, I was stopped at a light.  When it changed I anticipated the vehicle ahead moving out, but the driver opened his door and tossed the remains of his coffee out before starting off.  Took a couple seconds, but in the time I took my foot off my brake and then put it back on when he didn't move.  While the driver who rear ended me said she was at fault, looking at a broken fingernail, I think what may have happed is: she looked up, saw my brake light go off, looked down and missed my brake light going back on.  

A Ponzi Scheme? No, a Howe Scheme

 While I'm sure she didn't invent the idea, Sarah Howe did precede Mr. Ponzi in bilking people out of their money by promising unrealistically high returns and paying them off with the deposits from later suckers.  That's from this Jstor piece on women's banking.

(I didn't realize the Homestead Act gave women the right to homestead as well as men.)

Price of Using the Internet Is Eternal Vigilance?

 Someone said "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance". 

Maybe we should update it.  Just got a message supposedly from Paypal asking for money. It's a scam, but one I've not seen before. 

Maybe I Should See "Hamilton"?

 I know the musical is good but today I wrote a letter to the editor of the Post, in the course of which I looked up the lyrics of one of the songs--The Room Where It Happens.   Makes me think I should see it.  Is it available on Netflix? 

"Aging Software"?--Tufekci Is Wrong?

NYTimes columnist Tufekci had a piece  discussing Southwest Airlines problems in managing their airplanes and personnel.  I just looked it up online on Thursday evening, finding to my surprise the Times has a featire in their comment system called NYTimes replies where she responded to some of the comment.

She puts the blame on "aging software" used to schedule pilots and crew.  I'm not sure why I immediately objected to the term, but here's my thoughts:

"Aging", which I am, means to me a deterioration of abilities, your body goes, your mind goes, you go. But software, once written (and debugged) remains the same, essentially forever. It's a set of ideas, of data, of information, which may be lost or destroyed, but will always do what it was capable of doing at its origin. 

Tufekci also uses the metaphor of building a structure, but using shortcuts, skimping on the foundation, etc.  Saving money now but setting the stage for problems later.  That's also wrong.   She mentions "technical debt", which is an interesting concept, but seems to me to conflate problems. 

I'd suggest the Southwest problem is a problem of "aging", but not in the sense I outlined above--deterioriation.  Consider the mature individual, the completed building, the proven software--each fits its environment, fulfills its function. There's a match of thing and context. Obviously the match isn't perfect; it may be flawed, corners were cut on the building or the software, the individual ends in the wrong occupation, with the wrong spouse, etc.)  As time passes, the building and the individual will deteriorate, they'll require maintenance to stay functional. But not the software, except as bugs appear. 

So the term "aging" has two sides: change for the worse in the entity discussed and change in the environment in which the entity operates, impairing the match between entity and environment.

For Southwest I suspect their software dates to the airline's early days, when it was doing point-to-point flights, basically within California.  It's expanded vastly over the years, getting lots of plaudits from customers.  The consensus seems to be they failed to spend enough on upgrading their software.  News media doesn't die into details, so we don't know whether the software ran into capacity limits, whether the system was never changed to use new technology (like generating text messages to personnel), whether the fundamental data model was flawed in light of the new environment and the impact of very bad weather, or whether all of the these factors were at work.

At the end there's a mismatch of capacity and environment. For humans the capacity declines and the environment changes. For software the capacity stays the same while the environment changes.