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.

GSA FEDSIM has two BetterBuy pilots underway: Data.gov and ClearPath. The experience so far has been interesting. On my end, there was a tremendous amount of uncertainty leading up to the launch. Will the wiki work? Will people know how to use it? Can the server handle all the traffic? Will one or two voices dominate the discussion?

Several months worth of effort went into the launch. When we finally went live, I was anxious to see the response. And at first, nothing happened. . . . .

A few individuals created user names, but didn't change anything.

A few more folks provided free 'editing' services, correcting typos, spelling out acronyms, and correcting verb tense.

Finally, after about a week, we started to see meaningful discussions and contributions on the wiki. I was curious about why it took so long, so I asked a few users about their process. It turns out that industry had the same questions that I had. No one was sure who was 'authorized' to speak for their company. Normal procedures for providing a response to the Government for these companies are established, and this wiki threw a wrench in the works. It took a few days for them to develop a plan on how to response. One company even wanted to know when we were going to lock down the changes so that they could post their info at the last minute.

From my perspective, the Data.gov use of the wiki was a resounding success. We received a substantial amount of feedback, and our resulting solicitation will be significantly improved as a result. It will, however, take us longer to review the feedback and judge what should go into the final version. Now I'd like to see more attention on the ClearPath wiki. . . .

Lastly, I'll end my post with some wiki statistics:

Pages
(All pages in the wiki, including talk pages, redirects, etc.) -49
Page edits since BetterBuy was set up -373
Average edits per page -7.61
Registered users 152
Active users who have performed an action in the last 7 days -33
Views total 68,718 (misleading number - includes our testing)
Views per edit 184.23

Page Views
Main Page -46,304
MediaWiki:Sidebar -3,406
Background and Questions -3,143
Section B - 1,717
Section C - 1,694
RFI - 1,468
Section D - 1,097
Section F - 849
Section H - 714
FAQs 588

The General Services Administration buys a lot of stuff (products and services) for the country, and they're figuring out how to help us all get what we pay for.

Overall, the GSA's trying to figure out how to break from traditional bureaucracy, learning from private industry and the public, asking people what they think via a site BetterBuy.

One really good idea from BetterBuy is being tried now.

The GSA wants to break away from the traditional system where the companies that provide the stuff help specify what the stuff should be. Normally, they put out Requests for Information and Requests for Proposals, and companies help the GSA figure out what to specify.

That means the companies that want the business gets to define what the business is, and can tailor that to their strengths and weaknesses. Any change to this could threaten the less effective, less competitive businesses.

The deal is to open up this process to everyone, including the public and the companies who want business from the Feds, so that we can work together for the country. One way to do that is on the Net using a Wiki, and that's what they've created, the BetterBuy Pilot(s) Wiki.

GSA is seeking input on a requirement to provide a data repository for data.gov. The data.gov pilot was ready to launch on March 25, 2010. The second is called "Clearpath". For this one, GSA is looking for input on the technical infrastructure for our Clearpath hosting, and developing the approach for a future acquisition. GSA will launch Clearpath in a few weeks.

You are invited to contribute in multiple ways:

(1) Help us write the draft solicitation

(2) Ask questions below each section

(3) Engage in meaningful technical debate below each section

(4) Point out mistakes

(5) Ask general questions

(6) Contribute! This is the most transparent acquisition that GSA FEDSIM has ever attempted.

For better explanations check out Federal Computer Week GSA tries wiki approach to develop RFPs or GSA solicits wisdom of the crowd for acquisition improvements

In my earlier post, I commented on the "risk averse" nature of government acquisition. In our efforts to be fair to all, the manuals that we use grow longer and longer (e.g., the Federal Acquisition Regulations, supplemental Agency Regulations, Acquisition Policies, GAO decisions). This is an environment that has not embraced change and new technology, and for good reason.

When I asked around my office for volunteers to work on the pilot, not a lot of hands went up. A few brave souls eventually snuck over to my office to learn more, and finally we formed a team. We have a Contracting Officer, a Contract Specialist, a Project Manager, a few Technical Advisors, and an Acquisition Project Manager who will have to pull all of this together. Hopefully, I'll get to help steer all of this along without disrupting the rest of the organization's daily operations.

We spent the last two months evaluating the recommendations on BetterBuy, identifying the ideas that were feasible to implement, and working with our information technology support personnel to set up the infrastructure properly. We met with OMB, GAO, and other parts of GSA to discuss best practices for open collaboration, making decisions about things like user registration and authentication, roles and responsibilities for team members (e.g., who controls our twitter account, who can post). We are nearly ready with our wiki site for requirements definition. This process shines a bright light on established procedures and forces everyone to consider the value of the activity. Fun times!

My office (GSA FEDSIM) primarily works with other Federal Agencies on their procurements, but we also support a few internal GSA customers as well. We have been talking to these internal customers as the most likely candidates for the pilot project(s). We have two in our sights. Both are working with new technology and align well with the increased transparency through BetterBuy. We plan on launching the pilot in February, so stay tuned. . . . .