Preamble: I'm Kevin Merritt, CEO of Socrata, a leading provider of open data services, based in Seattle, WA. While Socrata is focused squarely on helping government organizations share their data in human-comprehensible and machine-readable ways, I don't personally have a long tenure of experience selling software or services to the government. In full, transparent candor, the procurement process is the most challenging part of working with the government. It's complicated. So much so that many companies selling to the government have GSA contracting specialists to help navigate the process. As a taxpayer and businessperson, I'm in favor of making it simpler and more effective for innovative companies to do business with the government.

In March the General Services Administration (GSA) conducted a pilot project designed to make procurement a more transparent process. In the pilot, GSA submitted to industry an RFI for the next phase of evolution of data.gov. I participated in the pilot and want to share my feedback as a means to hopefully improve the overall procurement process.

Historically, GSA would issue a Request for Information (RFI) and industry would submit their responses in private. There is no back-and-forth communication between GSA and industry while the RFI response window is open. Without regard to GSA specifically, an RFI is often used to conduct basic market research and to help refine the requirements that will ultimately be included in a formal solicitation - the Request for Proposal (RFP).

The BetterBuy pilot project was novel in that it asked industry and interested individuals to submit their responses to the RFI, through a publicly editable wiki. It was the most transparent and collaborative RFI conducted by the federal government to date.

For those unfamiliar with wikis, they are web-accessible, collaborative content management systems. They allow anyone to create new content pages and even to edit the content created by others. Wikis work well for a few reasons:

• General trust between and among the participants.
• A community moderation system that identifies and corrects erroneous content.
• A robust audit trail that shows who created (or changed) what.
• Tools allowing site administrators to manage content revisions and versions.

In general, the BetterBuy wiki pilot was a success. Quite a few people participated and the discourse was civil. I believe the GSA data.gov team received valuable feedback, which will shape and influence the detailed requirements of the RFP. As importantly, I believe industry received some valuable feedback from the GSA data.gov team.

GSA would not have conducted the pilot unless there exists a serious intent to improve the procurement process. I believe their intention is sincere and genuine. To that end, I have some constructive feedback and suggestions for improving the process in the future.

1. Don't map the structure of the RFI to the structure of the anticipated RFP. By doing so, the participant pool is somewhat restricted to those comfortable and/or familiar working within a prescribed format. What might be better is for the soliciting organization to loosely enumerate their questions and requested feedback, and broadly categorize those by subject area - background, physical architecture, logical architecture, security, functionality, accessibility, pricing, terms and conditions, etc.
2. One of the potential benefits in a more open process is a level playing field. As such, provide an RFI platform that offers more transparency about the participants themselves. For example:
1. Participants should use their full names and identify their affiliations;
2. GSA administrators should be easy to identify;
3. Industry submissions, including the possibility for multiple submitters per company, should be easy to identify;
4. I suggest having three contributor profiles with corresponding, visually distinct badges - administrators, industry and interested citizens.
3. The wiki site itself was a little sluggish throughout the response period, but especially in the last few hours leading up to the close of the response window. Make sure there are adequate resources so the site operates smoothly In future acquisition collaboration programs.
4. The GSA itself should be more collaborative during the RFI response window. For example, if industry responds to an initial question in a way that doesn't provide the answer/clarification it's seeking, why not annotate the response with a follow-up question? It's this kind of back-and-forth dialog that represents a really open and transparent discussion.
5. Consider using IdeaScale or similar crowd sourcing platforms instead of a wiki. Potential benefits include:
1. A more natural environment for questions and answers, especially when it's anticipated that there will be multiple answers per question and/or multiple answerers per question;
2. The ability to more elegantly categorize questions by subject area;
3. Greater ease of use, improving participation;
4. A clearer question and answer threading system allowing participants to both respond to official GSA questions/requests but to also reply, rebut and/or provide feedback on the answers provided by other participants;
5. Visual indicators and/or badges identifying participant roles and their affiliations;
6. The ability for participants to vote up/down good/bad ideas submitted by others;
7. The ability for participants to suggest new questions that weren't initially thought of;
8. The ability for administrators or participants to mark a response as the best answer;
9. More transparency around the number of answers provided, new questions asked, top votes, etc. via statistics and analytics.
6. Without regard for my 5th suggestion, if a wiki is the preferred approach for collecting industry feedback, take advantage of wiki "sections" which can be edited in isolation, more locally, without locking the entire page and without encountering edit collisions.

Unfortunately the current acquisition and procurement processes exclude many innovative companies - lacking the expertise, patience or desire - from providing much needed, best-of-breed technologies and services to the government. However, I believe the GSA is demonstrably serious about improving the acquisition process and the BetterBuy pilot is a big step in the right direction. We all can look forward to a more streamlined procurement process in the future.

To date, there have been 100+ ideas submitted for the BetterBuy Project ("the Project") and they keep coming in! Community participants are obviously very interested in the federal acquisition process and how to improve it. A little while ago, GSA's FEDSIM published Data.gov and ClearPath, which are the two Project pilot procurements which will test a few of the ideas/concepts that have been submitted.

As Mary Davie indicated in her March 25, 2010 blog entry titled "Transparency, Collaboration and Participation in the Federal Acquisition Process is Here," the American Council for Technology/Industry Advisory Council's Acquisition Management Shared Interest Group (SIG) is taking the next step to review the remainder of the ideas that have been submitted, categorize them and select a an additional number to be discussed further and possibly placed into action.

The Acquisition Management SIG has initiated the review process and is working towards the end goal of categorizing the remaining suggestions/ideas. We are discussing each suggestion in light of the ultimate objective of the Project, which is "how can we use collaboration and social media to make the federal acquisition process more efficient and effective?" Once complete, our plan is to involve the GovLoop Acquisition 2.0 community to further flesh out the suggestions through additional crowdsourcing, etc.

Please stay tuned for further progress reports and remain engaged in the conversation!

Over time, several trends have become apparent in regards to postings: 1) sometimes, there is not enough information or context to aid readers in getting a true understanding the suggestion, 2) lack of examples sometimes make it difficult to focus readers on how the suggestion might be implemented with Web 2.0 or social media technologies, and 3) many times original posters or other community members do not provide follow-on postings to add more context or answer questions.

When you post a suggestion or a follow-on comment, please try and provide some detail/context so that other readers, who may not be as knowledgeable as you in the subject matter, can grasp your ideas. Adding examples of how Web 2.0 and social media technology might be able to address your suggestion would be helpful as well.

We've received many postings to this site and value every one of them. There is a need, however, for follow-on community discussion on many of the postings. This type of exchange amongst community members will increase the overall knowledge of the community plus provide valuable context for the GSA, NAPA and IAC/ACT folks who will be determining which suggestions to address.

Thanks and keep your suggestions coming.

To date, the BetterBuy Project (BBP) has generated some superb input about ways to improve the federal acquisition process using Web 2.0 and social media technologies, as well as some other ideas on how to "fix" the process. I've summarized the main themes of BBP and categorized the ideas that have been generated thus far in keeping with the project themes: Openness, Collaboration and Transparency.

1) OPENNESS: Raise awareness of upcoming needs government is trying to fulfill, in order to assemble a pool of qualified providers who can compete on specific requirements.

Information Sharing. A number of respondents suggested methods for sharing information across organizations and agencies within the government. The formation of searchable information repositories containing results of market research, common contractual language, RFQ's and best practices appeared to be the common denominator amongst various participants. Often, it is difficult for acquisition professionals to search for and find information that would be useful in developing/executing their specific acquisition when looking across a single federal enterprise or government-wide.

2) COLLABORATION: Find ways for the government to engage in more 'open' conversations with the private sector on topics such as best practices, emerging technologies and innovations, and market conditions.

Collaborative requirements generation. Participants suggested that social media technology, such as wikis, be used to enhance the collaboration of process stakeholders, such as Integrated Project Teams, to develop the content of evaluation criteria, requirements documents, performance work statements, etc. There was recognition that collaboration between government-only participants behind federal firewalls would require different business rules and constraints than those collaboration efforts which also engaged industry and other non-federal players.

3) TRANSPARENCY: Give the public and interested parties timely data on upcoming and ongoing buying activities, with the goal of promoting fair and high-quality competitions.

Communications. A number of ideas were presented that would enhance the federal government's transparency and external communications with the vendor community during the solicitation process. Use of social media technology, including Twitter, live video streams, webinars, RSS feeds, and on-line chats could be used to supplement (perhaps in time replace) existing communications mechanisms to increase participation and reduce costs in the solicitation process. Several specific ideas included using Twitter to inform vendors of (proposal processing) status and using webinars for pre-proposal conferences or industry days.

Additionally, a number of suggestions indicated some level of frustration with the overall federal acquisition process, but did not directly address how Web 2.0 or social media technologies could be used to improve the process. This being said, these comments are valuable and add to the growing body of knowledge concerning the challenges being faced by today's acquisition professionals. These comments should be discussed and/or addressed by appropriate levels of leadership within the federal government.

I welcome other opinions on the above categorizations, especially if you have a different viewpoint. It's important as we move forward with this project that we understand the focus areas and the value statement of these areas contribute to improving the acquisition process for not only the practitioners, but the ultimate customer - the taxpayer.