>>>http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/02/03/964781/citizen-activist-grates-on-state.html
>>
>>practiced engineering without a license
>>
>>sheesh
>>
>>I hope this makes all the local news media and the national news media. Let's punish folks for being intelligent and taking the initiative. Either they got engineering acquaintances to do some of the computations and didn't get charged for it (but the work would probably have been signed in that case), or they did on their own (kudos to them). I guess they should have made the report look "sloppy" but then it would probably have been ignored entirely.
>>
>>Why doesn't the DOT have the engineers they hired review it? What on earth do they normally do when citizens submit their own reports that aren't as proficient? Just totally disregard them?
>
>OTOH, how many of us take citizen suggestions on how to write programs? ;-)

I do. Not exactly on the technicalities, but in terms of what the code needs to do. Of course, this is limited to paying citizens, called users. Which is completely different from the situation described in the article, right?