A Tale of Technical Policy

This is also a story connecting a chain of policy to a single technical decision. This story is from April, 2016. It comes from an engagement by the United States Digital Service (USDS) headquarters and the Defense Digital Service (DDS). Similar examples are legion. The Air Force has a troubled technology project. A large part of the project is a suite of software. One of the components in that suite is a scientific calculation written in a language called C++. The calculation relies on time-sensitive data, collected by measurement stations. If the data is older than two minutes, the calculation can’t use it. The measurement stations are distributed, delivering their data over a network. Several other components in the software suite also consume this data. The measurement stations send data using something called multicast user datagram protocol (UDP). Multicast UDP is a basic feature of the internet protocol (IP), since 1989. It provides a way for many listeners to receive the same d

This is also a story connecting a chain of policy to a single technical decision. This story is from April, 2016. It comes from an engagement by the United States Digital Service (USDS) headquarters and the Defense Digital Service (DDS). Similar examples are legion. The Air Force has a troubled technology project. A large part of the project is a suite of software. One of the components in that suite is a scientific calculation written in a language called C++. The calculation relies on time-sensitive data, collected by measurement stations. If the data is older than two minutes, the calculati