There's no better illustration than the the former Secretary of State (a demonstrably smart and detailed person) choosing to run a private email server in her house -- something to cause the most laissez faire IT professional to recoil in horror. In its current state of understanding the Hill has "virtually" no chance of solving any problem in IT (see this Wired article). Why is our government so stubbornly Luddite when dealing with IT?
Newsflash Senator Doe, your "social media director" is not a technology expert. Tech isn't "what the kids are doing these days". I started making a list of "important IT concepts for legislatures, but let's start with just one - the The ISO Network stack. If I get some positive responses I'll add to this thread and create a series of posts. First the techy stuff:
ISO Networking Stack
The ISO stack is an network model that helps troubleshooters like the Muse think through problems in layers of services or technologies. It helps techs get our arms around the "Big Picture". I won't explain it in detail here - read the Wikipedia article for a full description - but let's talk about why it's important.
Most computer programmers do not actually program "computers" (CPUs). The actual CPU code is so low level that it consists mostly of instructions to open and shuts little gates in address registers. Instead, most programmers program against a service layer which in turn depends on another service layer and so on.
Here's an example to keep your eyes from glazing over. Consider a simple task like tweeting. The Muse types "Trump is a Cotton Headed Ninny Muggins" into Tweetdeck and clicks "send".
Tweetdeck: Yo Chrome, I gotta message here to send to Twitter. My guy thinks he's got an opinion someone cares about - heh. (For some reason my Tweetdeck sounds like Di Niro's Al Capone).
Chrome: Got it Tweetdeck, I'll transpose it into the right format and get it sent down to transport. Hey transport, pretentious Mr. "Muse" thinks he needs to grace the world with his thoughts on twitter again. Here you go.
Transport: Okey dokey, let me fire up the old segment packager and box it up. Hey NIC I gotta another clever tweetery thingy from Mr. smarty pants. (Transport sounds like Uncle Joe from Petticoat Junction - shows how old I am).
NIC: Sending out packets. Confirming acknowledgement, Message sent and received. (NIC is at the physical layer. He doesn't have much programming - just a driver - so his personality suffers).
Of course I've left out many other things that have to happen. Notice that a Tweetdeck programmer didn't have to inform his program of how to segment his message, transcribe it into packets or guarantee it's delivery. He knows one or two things and he "hands off" the process to modules written by other programmers who also know one or two things - but none of them know everything.
This is the entire tech universe. Very few people "get" how the whole stack is intertwined - and no one understands very much. I have 30 developers -engineers working for me but there are only a few that get this "big picture" idea. The rest are "specialist". They can write complex stock option charts in Java or create OLAP cubes for data research, but they are happily stuck specializing at the level they understand.
So what? Why does this matter?
No one -- not Linus Torvalds, Bill Gates or Steve Job's ghost -- understands what is actually "there" when we talk about the internet. Even God probably has to consult some ginormous user manual. The net is not some planned city of carefully crafted pieces that fit together. There are dozens of avenues to do any one thing and dozens of ways to circumvent controls that are implemented.
It is as if a crew of gnomes worked independently creating cool things. Instead of showing their work the gnomes exposed only how to use them to each other. Eventually, they all began to use each other's cool things and some larger, cooler thing emerged. Before long they were dependent on the larger, cooler thing to create other cooler things and so on. It is not intelligent design. It's not even innovation writ large. It is evolution and natural selection.
Understanding this idea is the genesis for common sense solutions. Specific legislation that addresses narrowly specific problems will be obsolete a week after it is signed. There are too many ways to do everything and waaay too many gnomes.
Meanwhile, when it comes to finding broad principles to use we seem to atrophy. What we need is legislatures who see the big picture and are able to work in a non-ideological way toward broad common goals at the same speed as the advancing technology. Also, we need unicorns in the National Zoo.