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Why the #Censusfail Affects the Startup Community

Miles Burke
Miles Burke
#censusfail

It’s not that hard; ask millions of Australians to visit a website at roughly the same time. Website naturally goes down, social media armchair bandits start criticizing, entire Australian public loses trust in the Internet.

That’s pretty well how last night played out. The thing is, it hurts us all, as founders of products or services, often delivered or heavily utilising the Internet. We can point all we like to decision makers, and how they could have avoided this, but that’s mumbo jumbo to Jane or Joe Average.

It took years for people to trust security on the web to start using credit cards. Normal people; you know, like your neighbor or your elderly parents. Not us early adopters, of course.

What last night did, is show that technology doesn’t work to normal people. Yes, we in the know start asking questions about the $325,000 spent on load-testing and why that failed, the $9.606 million spent on the website and hosting, and we know what DDOS means, and how that’s very hard to avoid (if indeed it was a DDOS attack), but the damage is done.

Four simple things the census creators could have done better.

Not spent $9,931,725 on it.

Not have wide ranging criticism about security and privacy come up.

Not tell the world that it was unhackable or impenetrable.

Not let the bloody website fall over.

They should have let everyone know that you could complete it, like I and 2 million others did, in the lead up. I did mine on the weekend, and it was a lag-free breeze. This whole ‘get online on August 9’ was just asking for DDOS levels of traffic to hit a site at the same time.

They should have clarified the 23 September deadline – it was a snapshot of what everyone was doing last night, sure, but you could have ticked off the three kids and two adults in your house in your mind, and completed it later. You didn’t need to get told do it the same time as everyone else. Social media was freaking out they would all be fined.

Sure, they could have implemented cloud-based hosting, however imagine the privacy and security uproar then? There was enough of that when they had IBM Australia host it somewhere obviously very secure. It’s a tough gig, and if I had been offered $10 million to do what the developers and hosting company was doing, I would have said no; the potential impact to professional reputation is worse than the potential windfall of all that taxpayer cash.

They made such a big thing out of it not falling over, that it looks like someone or some groups decided to test that theory. Websites do get DDOSed and they do get taken offline. Ask the many enterprise and government departments across the globe how that worked out.

Promoting it as a ‘never going to fail’ solution was like a red flag to a bull.

We, as startup founders, need to work on the image of internet-based technology again now. Sure, it wasn’t our fault, but we’ll be the ones that potentially suffer from a lack of uptake, because people remember that #censusfail (which, when I checked, was trending way above their official hashtags during the evening).

Thanks Bureau of Statistics, IBM Australia and Revolution IT for the challenge ahead of us.

 

Census contracts
Census contracts

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Miles Burke

Miles Burke

Miles is the founder of employee survey start-up, 6Q, Founder & MD of an award-winning Perth digital marketing agency, and curates the Australian Software Guide.
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