The issue with technology in municipal governments is with budgeting and the "It works, why do we need to change it?" mentality. Governments will still insist on things sent in formats that were modern 20 years ago, why should I have to send 5 paper copies by mail to the DEP or mail a CD?

The civil engineering industry as a whole is still very paper based as well. Paper copies are signed and sealed by hand and sent in copies out to clients/bidders. Having to spend time printing everything gets extremely time and resource consuming. The argument for this style though is that some projects have a big public liability and records must be kept.

There are pushes in the right direction, but change is slow and many don't see the incentive of upending entire systems even though they can provide a real benefit.

There is a very underserved segment of the municipal government open/closed software space: for village-scale governments that declare independence from annexation from a nearby larger municipality seeking tax bases with dense enough populations. Generally these villages that get annexed are taxed just like their big-city counterparts, but still have to drive all the way into the city to avail themselves of most the city amenities they pay dearly for.

In these smaller village governments, they are extremely open to staying modern to save money. Some of their annual budgets are measured in six figures in the US, with one part-time clerical employee. They'll spend money to retain attorneys who specialize in this sector to do all the paperwork to interface to regional civil authorities, and state and federal authorities, because it outsources complex work to someone who knows all the right boilerplates to use. There perhaps is a market opportunity for someone on the software side to package up the complexity of processes in the operations side.

It is incredibly hard to get public institutions to update their processes. The way to do so is, sadly for us geeks, not technologically driven. I'm sure you know this, but to articulate it for other commenters: building and offering a better technological solution is not even 1% of the work. You are a technologist talking to non-technologist people. Getting people to agree on it and then use it is 99% of the work.

I don't get it... It's much, much easier to preserve records in digital format than in paper format.

Digital records are exponentially more complex to maintain in the long term. You need to deal with formats being unreadable, turnover of media, etc.

Future generations will find this era to be a black hole. All of the primary sources are electronic in formats that will be long forgotten centuries from now.

No they aren't. There are many open, non-proprietary formats that have existed for many years and will continue to exist for decades. TIFF is a great example.

In contrast, paper records cost a ton of money to store (they take up physical storage space, which means paying rent and/or opportunity cost) and they are also very easily destroyed in accidents such as fires or earthquakes. Oh, you want to create backups? Good fucking luck making copies of all the crumbling pieces of city legislation from 1960s.

Think of a catastrophe (natural or otherwise) which yielded a long-term interruption to the power grid— all those cloud-archived images and documents carefully striped with redundancy across multiple disks in different availability zones? All gone.

And yet a stack of papers in a fire-proof safe will be there and perfectly readable for centuries, with no intervention or maintenance required, and no special technology (at all) on the receiving end.

There are any of dozens ways this can happen; suffice to say that Romans in 400 AD also thought their way of life was permanent, and a few hundred years later, there was basically nothing left.

So picture a future archeologist exploring an abandoned data center populated by AWS hosts or Backblaze storage pods or whatever, attempting to recover information from the hardware he finds there. Even assuming all the disks are fully intact, how much chance would he have of recovering anything at all of meaning?

We don't know tons about the Egyptians or Romans or Aztecs from what they left us as their worlds collapsed, but it's possible we know considerably more about them than we'll be leaving for those looking back on us a millennia or two from now.

(And it doesn't even take a catastrophe— look at the effort YC is putting into getting that Alto working, and that's a machine that's just a few decades old!)

The abstracts written in WordPerfect v.whatever? Not so much.

Does anybody actually use TIFF? I've almost never seen one in the wild.

Any organization that uses a document management or records management software will have most of their documents in either (or a combination of) those formats.

So I started another software company to solve this problem: https://www.podaris.com/. The website is crap (we're bootstrapped and our priorities are currently elsewhere), but what we're developing is very, very cool, and will make infrastructure planning a lot more like using modern collaboration tools for document editing or software engineering.

Instead it's all e-mail and face-to-faces (at their high billing rates). Slows me down so much compared to my internal projects where we can have a Slack chatroom or google-docs/evernote organization system to keep track of everything.