Joshua-Michéle Ross, who previously wrote a profile of Stimulus Watch for O’Reilly Radar, has also made a short video walk-through of the site that highlights how quickly and cheaply the application was built. This is well-worth viewing for folks who must make decisions about investments in technology—especially at small non-profits with limited budgets. The money quote comes at around 5:00,
“This is an example of how quickly people can be moved to collective action, and how low are the costs to create very powerful software[.] So, the punchline there for businesses is that if you’re paying a million dollars for customized software, or you have relationships with very large consulting firms that tell you it’s going to cost millions of dollars to get something done, you really need to take a step backwards and look to whether or not that’s the best idea.
